A Matter of Taste

I've been so sick, ugly sick. My body's capacity to manufacture mucus has astonished me. It has, actually, humbled me.

I started blowing my nose the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I still haven't stopped. Although I was most miserable--with fatigue and fuzzy-headedness--just a few days in, the strangest part of my illness beset me after the first nine days. For four days, I couldn't smell or taste at all. I've never had that experience before--muted senses, yes. But this was an entire loss of both functions.

Eating was joyless, even disgusting. Coffee, stripped of its flavor, is starkly a drug, chicken is dry flesh that refuses to be chewed quickly. Lettuce is even more pointless than usual.

It was unbelievable that I could tear a basil leaf right under my nose and not smell a thing, while someone sitting several feet away could easily catch the scent. For the sake of being attentive, I tried to put words to what my mouth was experiencing: a square of Hershey's chocolate felt thick, like curtain of very soft heavy cloth loosely wrapped around my tongue. I thought I could tell it was sweet. Coffee was like prickly sawdust. Granola was like biting the sound of falling dishes.

Well, I just made that one up right now. My most recent batch of granola wasn't the best to begin with anyway.

My smell and taste has been fading back in for the past two days. Oddly, as it was fading out, I didn't even realize what was happening. I remember eating Thanksgiving dinner with extended family and thinking, almost subconsiously, that it wasn't very delightful. Two days later, I wondered why the blueberries my mother served with the pancakes were so bland. At lunch, I could taste the vinegar in the souse my father waxed nostalgic over (souse? oh, never mind), but by the time we drove home to Virginia and my husband cooked supper, I had lost it all. I had a mouth was full of rice and I realized I was chewing soggy cotton batting. Then I took a bite of kim chee and my mouth ignited. That's when I knew something was wrong--I haven't experienced kim chee as a spicy food for nearly 10 years. But without taste, my naked tongue was cowed by the capsaicin.

It was a sad stretch of days, being without smell and taste. I hoped that my senses would return all at once, like a light switched on, and the glorious music would blare and I would taste apples! coffee! cheese! cranberries! green beans! like never before! But they're just creeping back and all I can do is swear to myself that I will appreciate them wholeheartedly for the rest of my life.