Last week we had a few short days of cold in between the never-ending heat wave that started a couple of months ago. Apparently this short period was long enough for me to catch both a flu AND strep throat. My throat was extremely sore and had streaks of blood, my nose and sinus were congested with a painful vacuum inside my skull, my eyes hurt, my head hurt, I had muscle aches and pains, I was weak, drowsy, and had no energy. Basically I was a zombie, the living dead; wait no, zombies don’t have pain.
The worst part of it all was definitely the throat. My throat was so painful I could not even swallow my saliva let alone food, not that I could eat food anyway.
I managed to more-or-less heal my throat in less than two days—in less than three hours really. On Saturday my throat was awful, on Sunday it was worse. I then watched Heavenly Creatures from 1:00-3:30pm after which it was suddenly fine. I guess I just had to get my mind sufficiently distracted for a while; or maybe it was a heavenly miracle 🙂
Anyway, I still have massive congestion but recently discovered a much worse problem. It seems that I have lost my sense of smell and sense of taste. I don’t understand why having a cold could cause these senses to be lost now when I’ve had colds all my life without such effects. What’s scarier is that my mother also has a cold and is also experiencing a loss of smell and taste for the first time ever.
On Tuesday night we finally broke in the new deep-fryer. We made fish-and-chips. We deep fried up a batch of chips (fries) and began eating them while the second batch was cooking. Unfortunately it did not taste as good as we were hoping. We waived it off as a result of having snacked earlier or something. I nagged that the fries did not even taste like potatoes let alone the delicious deep-fried chips that I was expecting. I knew there was something wrong, but I thought it was because we were not doing it right and were killing the flavor somehow, maybe over cooking, or using the wrong oil or something.
We then fried up the fish and tried that. Again it was the blandest thing I had ever eaten. This time I remarked that we were obviously not doing it right and needed more practice because the food we were making was so bland that it was actually nullifying the taste of the tartar sauce and ketchup.
Yesterday I had some chicken salad for lunch and noticed that it had no flavor at all; actually I noticed that the pickles had no flavor which was extremely unusual because those pickles have a LOT of smell and taste. It suddenly dawned on me—I forgot to use the phrase “is it just me or…?”—that it really was just me. I did not notice at first because I knew from past experience that the salad was good but could not tell that I was not actually tasting it. For all we know the food on Tuesday was delicious but we could not tell because we had lost our sense of smell and taste.
I decided to conduct a test. I went around the kitchen and smelled everything; the pickle jar, the vinegar, mustard, hot peppers, soy sauce, everything. Not a single item had any smell whatsoever. I then tried tasting them. I swallowed some soy sauce, salt, lemon, vinegar, pickled peppers, mustard, barbecue sauce, chocolate, sugar, everything. Not a single item had any taste whatsoever.
I was scared out of my mind. I have never experience such a thing before. NOTHING HAD ANY SMELL OR TASTE!!!
Since yesterday I have wasted a little food just because my stomach hurt. I say wasted because I could very well have filled my stomach by eating cardboard, I did not enjoy the food at all.
It’s been almost a week since this started and about four days since I noticed it. I am anxiously waiting for it to end so that I can eat again. On the bright side I have finally broken 180 again and am at 178.5 lbs.
Fascinating how smell and taste are so connected and how memory has so much influence on them. It is also interesting how a large part of hunger is mental. I wonder why Selma Bouvier is so fat.
(*UPDATE*)
My senses of taste and smell returned after about a week and I lost them again one or two times in the following year. I suspect that it may have been stress-induced. Thankfully they have not yet failed since then.