For those of you who have acquired diminished senses or abilities due to age, or pathology, which one would you most like to restore to original capacity?
I would most like to restore my senses of smell (olfaction) and taste (gustation)—they’re similar, so I’m counting them as one. Normal aging reduced these in me to ~80% of normal capacity. Then I got hit with a bout of Bell’s Palsy, leaving me at about 20% capacity from what they were when I was young. Some things I can still taste pretty well, like bacon (yay!), but most things I can barely taste at all (boo!). I expect this will be permanent.
I’ve always been a bit of a foodie, so being barely able to taste the dishes I used to love making and eating is a Debbie-downer for me. It’s funny, though, sometimes I’ll be eating something that I used to enjoy, and still enjoy it. Then I realize, I’m not really tasting it so much as remembering what it used to taste like. So, I stick with foods I’m familiar with, and avoid anything new, because I’ll have no idea what it’s supposed to taste like. I also have to be careful about spoiled foods…or drinking cat urine, thinking it’s lemonade.
The upside is that I can now buy cheaper foods, and just imagine they are more expensive (e.g. I now buy cheap ground coffee, instead of the expensive blends I used to buy). Ahh, that’s a great cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain (actually, it’s Kroger Breakfast Blend).
How about you, what senses or abilities (physical or mental) have you lost that you’d most like to restore?
And, because I’m feeling generous and inclusive, for those of you who have not noticed a reduction in sensory perception or abilities (you dad-burn younguns ), which one would you like to increase to 125% normal capacity?
I haven’t suffered too much reduction in sensory abilities, although i had great night vision as a kid. But i (still) have an excellent sense of smell/taste, and i feel your pain, and really fear losing it.
I’m pretty casual about food safety in part because i can be, i can smell decay. (And yes, i know that some pathogens don’t much affect flavor, but the conditions that favor them also favor stuff that smells bad, so a good sense of smell is a decent way to estimate total degree-hours of risk.)
And while I’m a picky eater because there are a lot of tastes i don’t love, i also get enormous pleasure out of the food i like.
I know what people are around because i smell them.
I suppose it would be easier to care for the foster kittens if i weren’t so aware of their stench, though.
Hearing. My fading ears and loud tinnitus are a problem now at age 64 despite state-of-the-art hearing aids & I really fear what my future holds.
Needing spectacles is mildly vexing, but I still see very well with them and plenty adequately to drive without them.
But I can’t understand more than 10-20% of the dialog of a movie watched in my own silent home where I can control the volume & optimize the settings on my TV and my aids. Between the music, the sound effects, the background noise, and the “natural” = non-enunciated dialog, it’s mostly just unintelligible mud with the occasional keyword poking out. IF any of the actors / characters are speaking foreign-accented English, they may was well be speaking Chinese.
Hearing. It’s starting to impact my work and social life.
Deafness runs in the family, but even though that has normalized hearing loss, it’s also given us a front row seat to the impact it has on your enjoyment of life.
I appreciate modern filmmakers making more realistic movies (I recall this trend starting in the 70s), but it comes at the expense of my understanding the dialog. Sure, people mumble a lot in real life, but we don’t need actors mumbling all the time in movies. Thank goodness for subtitles (but, that diverts my attention from the pretty actresses onscreen ).
Folks like Cary Grant and Bette Davis had very stylized speaking voices, but they enunciated every word clearly and projected well.
Yes, these days I have to calculate the worth it/not worth it ratio before making an effort to get up from my chair. Ice cream cone? Yes, absolutely. Clean the cat litter pan? Nah.
Restore? I’d like to have had good eyesight in the first place.
At age 5, the docs figured out I was nearsighted. So much so that I couldn’t see (read) anything on a blackboard. I’ve needed strong correction my entire life, ranging from severe to extreme. I had RK done as soon as I could, in an attempt to gain some normalcy (it worked, at least I had glasses that didn’t resemble the bottom of a Coke bottle).
After aging a few decades, I was back to -8.5 dioptres which I believe is in the “severe” range again. About a month ago, a surgeon tried to correct it with cataract surgery but there were problems. I now have decent vision in one eye, but none in the other. The docs think they can repair the nearly blind eye in the next few months, but there’s no hope of getting “in focus”. In fact, the surgeon said my eyes were beyond the limits of complete correction before the first surgery.
So, if a genie appeared tomorrow and I was only allowed a selfish wish, it would be for good eyesight. I don’t mind the missing sense of smell, or failing knees, or the memory problems (head injury). I’d just like to see well.
Much the same here for me. I’ve grown increasingly farsighted as I’ve aged, and am completely dependent on reading glasses for anything close-up now, but it’s a minor hassle.
My hearing, OTOH, has been problematic ever since I went to a Motorhead concert while in college, and stood about 15 feet away from the amplifiers for 90 minutes. I have difficulty hearing properly in any sort of noisy environment, such as a restaurant or bar, and it’s gotten worse over the past few years. I likely do have hearing aids in my not-too-distant future.
If you can afford it, do it sooner than later. I got a rechargeable pair with Bluetooth and a phone app last fall, and they have changed my life. I have presets for any situation where it might be difficult to hear what someone is saying. Eating out is a whole new social experience now.
It was in 1985, and I was 20, so the concept of “you should wear ear protection at a rock concert” was simply not a thing that we thought of at the time.
FWIW, the amps were so loud that one couldn’t even really hear the music: it was essentially 90 minutes of crazy distortion.
Concerts were loud then even if you weren’t right next to the speakers. I remember going to a Moody blues concert with friends, and literally chewing up my program so i could stuff it in my ears, the sound was so painful. And i was no place close to the loudest parts.
And, this concert wasn’t even in a proper concert venue, with something approaching proper acoustics: it was in the Turner Hall in Madison, which was, in essence, a small gymnasium, with wooden floors and concrete walls.
I used to be able to recall a word or find an object in an instant, and now there’s sometimes just a blank where that memory should be. I worry that it’s incipient dementia, but my doctor doesn’t think it is. She says it sounds stress-related, and I must say it’s much worse when I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep or I’m worried about something. I’m hoping it improves on its own as I get better at stress reduction.
My hearing also used to be excellent, but nowadays I’m having trouble focusing on one particular sound in a noisy environment, and I routinely use captions when watching shows. One of the things that really bothers me is the recent trend for information to be in video or spoken format instead of written. If a YouTube video doesn’t have captions or a podcast a transcript, I’m simply not going to learn about whatever they’re discussing.
@kenobi_65: Seconding what @Elmer_J.Fudd says. The sooner you start with assistive devices, the better the outcome. Your brain is forgetting how to hear right now. I got my first set for my 60th birthday and should probably have had them 5 years before.
I know our Moms tried to get us to do without glasses because they’ll “weaken your eyes”. That was wrong then and is well-known to be wrong now. As to ears even more than as to eyes. With ears there’s no such thing as squinting.
), which one would you like to increase to 125% normal capacity?
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Yes, absolutely. Clean the cat litter pan? Nah.