A Covid victim says the disease has scrambled her senses to the extent that coffee now smells like car fumes, toothpaste tastes like petrol and chocolate is too disgusting to stomach.

Sarah Govier, a 44-year-old from Whitstable, caught the virus in May and like many others lost her sense of smell.

But months after it came back she was struck by a bizarre new symptom - a total distortion of her senses.

The mum-of-two says nearly "all food smells rotten" and she's lost weight because she can barely bring herself to eat some of her favourite meals.

Sarah, an occupational therapist, said: "Coffee tasted horrible and cleaning my teeth with toothpaste felt like brushing them with petrol - it was vile.

"At first, everything smelt basically the same, so coffee smelt the same as if someone was smoking or like car fumes.

"Garlic and onions smelt awful - I can't even describe it, and because they're in basically every recipe or ready meal it made cooking very challenging.

"If I went into someone's house and they were cooking I would smell a mixture of wet dog and rancid water - everything just stank like mould.

"I was having to sniff things before I ate them and it felt quite feral, like a weird kind of animal.

"The aftertaste was often just as bad as I could taste that horrible smell, and it would also linger in the kitchen for days. I even had to spit out chocolate."

The medical name for Sarah's bizarre symptoms is parosmia.

'Cleaning my teeth with toothpaste felt like brushing them with petrol...'

Doctors have found people with Covid-19 lose their sense of smell because the virus damages the receptor nerve endings or supporting cells within their nose.

These scent-detecting nerve endings tell the brain how to interpret the chemical information that makes up a smell, and when damaged or heal incorrectly, it can lead to parosmia.

Sarah said colleagues at William Harvey Hospital tested positive in April, but she didn't have the classic symptoms of a cough and high temperature.

But one day she came home totally exhausted and developed a sore throat, so stayed off work and booked a test on May 2.

While her husband Jim, 47, and kids Jake, 11, and Daniel, eight, didn't get symptoms, the afternoon after her test, she lost her senses of taste and smell.

"I was cooking a curry and one minute I could smell it, but when I went to taste it I couldn't taste anything," she said.

"I ran upstairs and sprayed some perfume on my wrist, but I couldn't smell anything and that was when I knew I had it so I just started crying."

She got a positive test result a few days later and lost her senses of taste and smell for five or six weeks.

It was when going out with a friend in August that Sarah realised she had taken another turn - this time with her senses being distorted.

She went out for a fry up found everything tasted very salty, and the meat was "almost floral, like soap or perfume".

"Gradually over a few days things just started smelling awful, but it's very hard to describe because it doesn't smell like anything you've ever smelt before," she explained.

"Food shopping became a nightmare because I had no motivation to do any cooking.

'It can feel quite lonely as it really affects you pretty much all day every day...'

"I was 10 stone in August which is the heaviest I had been in a long time, but within a couple of weeks of developing my parosmia I lost half a stone just because I wasn't eating."

Her altered sense of smell means she is also hypersensitive to the pong of sweat and urine.

"I can also smell sweat really strongly in situations where you wouldn't normally notice, like just when I get a bit hot from walking the kids to school," she said.

"A small bit of perspiration in my clothes smells like rotten cabbage, and when you can smell yourself all the time you get really paranoid.

Sarah posted her symptoms on a Covid support group page and discovered she wasn't alone.

The mum-of-two was then inspired to create her Facebook group called 'Covid Anosmia/Parosmia Support Group', which now has more than 4,000 members from all over the world.

She said: "People come on and thank me and can't believe they're not the only ones.

"There's been some parents who are miserable because they couldn't smell their newborn baby.

Some sufferers have tried re-training their brain with 'smell training' - putting essential oils on bits of paper and smelling them about twice a day.

"It can feel quite lonely as it really affects you pretty much all day every day," Sarah added.

"So many celebrations and social events revolve around eating or going out to a restaurant, so right now there's part of me that's grateful for the restrictions stopping all that."

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