About a week ago, I had a nasty bout of food poisoning, probably staphlococcus. The suspect meal was, unfortunately, a large one, and I spent a good portion of an entire night puking my guts out (sorry, no polite way to say it). The cramping and the alternating chills and sweats of a brief but intense fever were an added bonus attraction.
Needless to say, I didn’t even want to look at food for a couple of days, and survived mostly on juices and dry toast. Gradually, my appetite came back to normal. But now that I have resumed my normal eating habits, something is amiss. You see, nothing tastes the same as before. It’s hard to describe – it’s not that my usual culinary delights taste bad, but everything I eat tastes just a bit “off.” Just enough to be annoying and not very satisfying.
Question is: is this probably just a psychological thing that will pass, or is there possibly some physical reason for it? Either the repeated vomiting (which by the 4th or 5th session was brining up mostly fluid and bile) or the poisoning itself perhaps doing something nasty to my taste buds?
Whatever the cause, I hope it is not permanent. Eating is one of the few joys I have in life. <g>
The same thing happened to me several years ago. I caught a cold, no worse than any other I’ve had, and lost my senses of taste and smell, which is normal, I think. The cold ran its course, lasting about a week or so, and I felt great again.
Going to work one morning I passed a business that had burned the day before and was still smoldering in lots of places with lots of smoke and I realized I didn’t smell the smoke. That’s the first time I realized something was wrong. Then cola flavored sodas started having a strange aftertaste and I had to switch to lemon-lime flavor. Fresh oranges didn’t taste right, candy corn tasted wrong and worst of all, chocolate wasn’t tasty anymore.
I waited a couple months before going to a doctor, hoping things would get back to normal on their own; they didn’t. I went to an ear-nose-throat doctor who prescribed Prednisone, I think, for several weeks. All that did was make everything I ate taste like the medicine.
Next he recommended a CAT scan, in case I had a brain tumor. That was negative. He said the next step was to start doing neurological testing but I said no, I can live without the sense of smell and the changed sense of taste, and I did.
It lasted for a couple of years, with my sense of smell returning first, slowly, 'till it’s back to normal. Sometime last year I realized that my taste was getting back to normal and now it’s as good as it used to be. I switched back to colas and can enjoy candy corn, oranges, and chocolate agaim. Mmmm.
I don’t know what caused the problem or what fixed it but I’m glad. Maybe I’m just lucky.
A cold is different from a stomach bug… the ‘taste’ of food is determined by what your tongue <i>and</i> your nose can detect. Try holding your nose while eating something with subtle flavours, and you’ll find that the food doesn’t taste right.
I always find when I have a cold that there are lots of foods I just can’t eat, because they taste bad when my nose is stopped up. A couple of years ago I had a really bad general respiratory infection that left me with asthma for a few months, and when that was all over I seemed to have lost my nose for wine. :rolleyes:
I don’t know. I didn’t eat any of them while my taste buds were weird. CPs aren’t one of my favorites, of course they might have become a favorite if I had tried one during that time.
