If you had to give up one of your 5 senses for a month, which would you pick?

[jjakucyk]

@Folly

@muldoonthief

In that case I’d pick taste, since much of the eating experience is actually from your olfactory nerves.

That’s what I’m thinking. If you don’t have smell, you lose most of taste as well.

It’s not that simple. I had my tonsils taken out when I was in my mid 30s (do not recommend!), and after two weeks of horrible pain, plus eating nothing but Jell-O, juice, popsicles, and thin Lipton soups, I was anxious for some real food. It all tasted awful. When they clamp your mouth open to do the surgery it crushes the tongue enough to cause temporary nerve damage. I could smell just fine, but my taste receptors were all messed up. They weren’t completely off though. Still, no amount of salt, sugar, or spices could make anything taste good. I can’t say for sure if I just tasted bitter, or had 50% bitter and 25% sweet, or if it was all equally dulled, but I remember making several meals, or even having a scoop of ice cream, and putting them back in the fridge after eating just a few bites because it was like eating paper. It was good for my weight, but thoroughly miserable because I was hungry and the food still smelled good. It took another month or two to finally get back to normal.

@Dr.Strangelove

@Whack-a-Mole

Touch maybe.

You’d probably be dead before the end of the month. You wouldn’t be able to do anything. You couldn’t walk, or pick anything up, or type, or really interact with anything. I don’t think you could even eat properly since chewing and swallowing require some sense of touch. I doubt your intestines would work. Ever have Novocaine? It would be like that, except instead of a tiny portion of your mouth, it would be every square centimeter of your body–even the insides.

There’s some people out there who can’t feel pain (congenital analgesia). It sounds great at first, but it’s actually pretty awful. They still have a general sense of touch, so they’re not klutzes who drop everything or stumble over themselves. But not being able to feel pain means they’re always burning themselves, biting their tongue, breaking bones, pulling muscles, cutting their fingers, and not noticing sores or infections. It’s so dangerous in fact that most people who have it don’t make it to adulthood. Yikes.

[puzzlegal]

@Mama_Zappa

I had thought that it was widely accepted that it was the loss of smell that was the major culprit with COVID (though I could be wrong). Certainly in my limited sample size (me), it was smell, not actual taste (I could still detect sweetness, for example).

loss of smell is much more common, but when I was researching it (when I had that symptom with covid) I found a lot of studies that looked at people who had lost their sense of taste, too. So both happen.

[peccavi]

@jjakucyk

It’s not that simple. I had my tonsils taken out when I was in my mid 30s (do not recommend!), and after two weeks of horrible pain, plus eating nothing but Jell-O, juice, popsicles, and thin Lipton soups, I was anxious for some real food. It all tasted awful. When they clamp your mouth open to do the surgery it crushes the tongue enough to cause temporary nerve damage. I could smell just fine, but my taste receptors were all messed up. They weren’t completely off though. Still, no amount of salt, sugar, or spices could make anything taste good. I can’t say for sure if I just tasted bitter, or had 50% bitter and 25% sweet, or if it was all equally dulled, but I remember making several meals, or even having a scoop of ice cream, and putting them back in the fridge after eating just a few bites because it was like eating paper. It was good for my weight, but thoroughly miserable because I was hungry and the food still smelled good. It took another month or two to finally get back to normal.

Losing the sense of taste is better than what happened to my BIL. After a botched operation, he was being treated with massive antibiotics for the sepsis that developed and coincidentally caught COVID (asymptomatic). The end result was cacogeusia (unpleasant or revolting taste). Everything tasted rancid and rotten, sufficiently revolting that he couldn’t overcome his gag reflex enough to choke anything down. A fairly skinny guy, he lost 40 lbs in a few weeks, while subsisting on protein drinks and a few foods that allowed him a few bites before the gag reflex kicked in. Once he was off the antibiotics (and post-COVID), his regular sense of taste gradually returned to normal, but for a while, we were seriously concerned by his physical condition and the severe depression that went along with it.