At dinner last night I was reminded again about how my tasted are muted by chemotherapy. It’s been the unofficial theme for the week so I thought I would share another anecdote.

We had tickets to the Symphony to hear Handel’s Messiah, and we did dinner beforehand at one of our favorite downtown restaurants. We did what we usually do and just ordered 4 or 5 items off of their amazing Happy Hour menu to share. After we had been eating for a while I started to feel a little odd. I was feeling burpy/gassy and I realized that my stomach and esophagus were hot and burny as though I had been doing shots of whiskey all night. I mentioned the odd sensation to Christine who sort of gave me a “Well, yeah!” look and pointed to one of the three delicious sauces that came with our order of Rustic Cut Sweet Potato Fries. According to her I had pretty much been dipping my fries in liquid fire all night. She herself had taken a dip into that sauce a few times and was still suffering a bit from it 20 minutes later. Me, I had no idea. I ate it all.

Knowing what the feeling was made it it even weirder. Normally when eating spicy things (or previously, what a normal person would call “Mild”) I feel it first in my mouth, then if I continue to eat more, in my stomach and esophagus. But now apparently I no longer get this sensation in my mouth. As Stine put it: “your mouth is there to protect the rest of you from eating things that are too spicy, but now it looks like your alarm has been disabled.” I would almost describe it similarly to having your mouth numbed by Novocaine. You know that you’re supposed to be feeling something there, but you can’t. The switch has been turn off.

I had mentioned earlier this week that I’ve been eating what I knew to be spicier food than I had previously ever enjoyed, but this was the first time that I really realized how muted my tastes really have become. I had put away an entire bowl of spicy sauce that she could only handle a tiny tiny bit of. And based on that scale I know that I NEVER would have even made through even the first taste of it before going through chemotherapy. I can’t even stress how adverse to spicy foods I used to be. Now would appear that sky’s the limit!