an unusual symptom

[lori67]

I lost the sense of taste on half of my tongue about 5 months before I was diagnosed.  My doctor said he wasn't sure if it would come back or not after surgery, but I figured I'd already lived with it like that for 5 months - not too big a deal.  After the surgery, everything tasted like metal - especially anything with tomato or tomato sauce.  Arrggghhh.. my beloved pizza tasted like wet cardboard with metal shavings on top!

The metal taste is mostly gone now, but I do have a problem tasting salt.  I find myself reaching for the salt shaker, when I'd never done that before the surgery.  I just have to season everything to within an inch of it's life - salt, pepper, hot sauce - whatever.  And on another strange note, after surgery, I suddenly wanted to eat grapefruit.   Odd because I always hated grapefruit.  My family still can't get used to me eating it because I couldn't even stand the smell of it before.  Now if I could have had them turn off my chocolate sensors while digging around in my brain  we'd be in pretty good shape over here!!

[TP]

Before my sugery I ate a lot of spices but after my sugery I didn't care for extra seasoning at first. However, my sense of smell returned. I woke up from a 9 hour surgery with a hole in the back of my head, SSD, double vision, facial paralysis and horrible pain on the right side of my body (from laying on it all day) and all I could say to all the nurses and DR's standing around me was I can smell all of you guys. I could smell perfume, BO, bad breath, hair spray and deodorant. It was like my nose got a wake up call and decided to start working again. I must have lost my sense of smell years ago and didn't realize it.

Once I started eating I had to suck on candy for months and didn't care for meat at all. After a couple of months I started using Biotene and that helped greatly. After about a year my taste is back to normal, using regular toothpaste and enjoy all foods again, just need to have a drink nearby because I still have paralysis and my mouth gets very dry.