What Cancer Smells Like, According To A Woman Who Smelled Lymphoma On Herself Before Doctors Found It
Krakenimages.com | Shutterstock Just over 2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year. Unfortunately, many of those people don’t receive a diagnosis until it’s too late for their medical team to aggressively treat and attack the cancer.
One woman might have found a strange workaround that alerts you to the presence of cancer in your body before any doctor detects it or you begin experiencing symptoms. She’s convinced that it’s possible to actually smell cancer because it’s how she got diagnosed with lymphoma.
She said her ‘hound dog nose’ detected her cancer before there were any other signs.
Kate St. John shared several videos on TikTok discussing the unconventional way she found out she had cancer. She explained, “I knew I had cancer before I even brought it up to my doctors because I could smell it on my clothes and on my sheets, even after I deep washed them multiple times.”
St. John said that her incredibly strong sense of smell alerted her that she needed to have some medical tests done, which proved she had Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. After undergoing treatment that left her cancer-free, she couldn’t smell the strange odor anymore.
“A few months later, I noticed the smell is back in my house,” she recalled. “And sure enough, imaging confirmed that lymphoma was back.”
Not long after, St. John noticed a similar but slightly different smell that she described as what happens “when you add a different seasoning to a soup.” That made her think she had another form of cancer, and her doctors confirmed the disease was now in her thyroid.
Cancer has a really unique scent that people might experience differently, per St. John.
In another video, she said the best way she could describe the smell of cancer was having the same smell as a hangover. It may be hard for some people to pin down what a hangover smells like, but she said it is “putrid” and “stale,” as if “the air has not circulated.”
In an explanation that she admitted was probably confusing, St. John said cancer smells like death because that’s what it can lead to, but not in a way that’s similar to decomposition. Instead, she said it’s like “a very faint lemon drop” and “as if a very cold layer of silk lace is being laid onto you.”
Apparently, her lymphoma reminds her of the smell of burnt cinnamon, while her thyroid cancer is similar to a dead peony. But she acknowledged those won’t be universal experiences for everyone with those kinds of cancer.
“Did you know that everybody can know the scent of a flower, a specific flower, but that same flower is going to smell a little bit different to everybody else?” she asked by way of example.
St. John claimed she was able to smell her cancer because of synesthesia.
The Cleveland Clinic defined synesthesia as “a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting colors or feeling sounds.” If someone has synesthesia, they process something one of their senses picks up in at least two areas of their brain. This causes a secondary effect, which activates an unrelated sense.
It’s not clear how this would translate to smelling cancer, though, or if that’s even possible. Just like in the heartbreaking film “The Art of Racing in the Rain,” scientists have found dogs can sometimes smell chemicals that are released in the body because of cancer, but not in a way that’s so reliable that they could be used in diagnosis.
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Humans can smell some symptoms of cancer, like an ulcerating tumor with necrotic tissue, but it’s not believed that they can actually detect the odor of cancer itself.
We may never really know what happened in St. John’s case. Maybe she does have some seriously strong synesthesia that went beyond what scientists generally believe is possible, or maybe the Universe was just giving her a nudge to go to the doctor. Either way, there’s no doubt in her mind that she smelled it.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
