When all you can smell is your brain

In the summer of 2005 Molly Birnbaum was out jogging near her home in Brookline Massachusetts when she was hit by a car. The impact fractured her skull and severed her olfactory nerves, leaving her without a sense of smell. The prognosis was bad - Birnbaum was told she would never smell again. Depressed and deprived of her sense of smell, and therefore taste, she was forced to give up her place at culinary college and with it, her ambitions of becoming a chef. But instead of resigning herself to living without scent, Birnbaum ended up on a quest to find out more about this mysterious sense, and eventually got her sense of smell back.

She tells this story in her book Season to Taste.
New Scientist spoke to her about her experience