If you got COVID and lost the ability to taste things, did it ever come back? Otherwise, did you experience any other long term consequences from the pandemic in general?
Never heard any follow ups on the taste thing, so I need answers
4 years since 2020. Time really flies when a catastrophic global event hits you in the face
My sense of taste kind of came back, but severely muted for some things. Coffee never quite got back to the same level of flavor, for example. I've also noticed my ability to taste salt is pretty shot. I can, but I have to add stupid amounts of the stuff. For an example, I had to do a clear liquid diet about a week ago prior to a medical procedure, and drinking some broth with 748mg of sodium per serving just tasted like drinking greasy water to me.
In terms of long term effects, it's a bit harder to say. I got covid for the first time in August 2020 (yay for being an essential peasant!), and I was out of work until May 2021. I had to do months of PT because of what my primary doctor called a post-viral fatigue syndrome. At its worst, if I tried to walk more than a block away from my apartment and back, I would wake up the next day feeling sore from my neck down to my toes. I remember a day where I slept for 12 hours, woke up and made and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and just doing that left me so tired I went back to sleep for another 6 hours or so.
Other stuff is less clear. It certainly started manifesting and presenting symptoms after I had COVID, but correlation and causation being what it is, it's hard to definitively say what might have just been low-level and not bothering me that much before and what could have been kicked off by COVID. I developed photophobia, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and some nerve damage after being ill for the first time, which are all fun.
I guess the photophobia is the easiest to manage, I just need to wear heavily tinted glasses at all times, as I get these awful migraines if I don't. Uncovered light bulbs, TVs, monitors, whatever can set them off. The thyroid condition I get to take a synthetic hormone basically for the rest of my life and get blood work done 4 times a year to see how it's working. The nerve damage I get to take another medication pretty much for forever as well, thanks to US insurance. Instead of a daily pill, my neurologist could give me an occipital nerve block every 3-4 months, but insurance doesn't want to pay for them unless it's done at a pain management clinic. For reasons I can't work out, every pain management clinic I looked at with my referral seemed to be out of network for everyone, so it'd run me like $700 for the initial visit and $400 every 3-4 months after that. I guess they know they've got you if the pain is bad enough? Anyway, my prescription has been working so far and it's the only thing I don't even need to pay for before hitting my deductible, so I have that going for me.
I've also noticed my ability to taste salt is pretty shot.
That's really interesting - for most people it is the nasal receptors that are included - lost of "taste" is actually lost of smell. I'm not sure I've head of someone losing salt, sweet, soutr or bitter.
The first time I didn’t lose my taste it just made a few things taste slightly weird, most of it didn’t last too long but orange juice tasted a bit different for a few weeks. I’m pretty sure I had it again over Christmas as I literally had no taste when I woke up on the morning of the 27th, but it slowly came back throughout the day. Again orange juice tasted slightly weird for a few days after but now I think it tastes normal? Or at least more normal than it did last week
I had never fully lost smell or taste just kind of dulled it. However the brain fog is what killed me. It’s been 3 years and I’m just starting to feel a little better. lol or maybe I’m just more used to it.
Didn’t lose my smell or taste but after the initial flu-like stage of my infection was over I didn’t really get any better. And my doctor made it worse by telling me to power through and start working again. Nowadays I can only leave the bed to go to the toilet.
I’m about to participate in a study with some experimental treatments. Stupid thing is that I have to do an exercise test at the beginning so that they can measure the effectiveness. I took a shower last week and that’s left me in pain that will persist over the next few weeks. I shudder to think about what that exercise test will do.
But Portal taught me to do everything for science.
I read something saying that it takes 6-12 months for the neural pathways for taste and smell recognition to reform in a permanent way.
I briefly lost my sense of taste and smell 2 years ago. I ‘got it back’ after a week, but everything is still less intense… maybe 20-30% muted. Some things came back with very distinct differences. Alcohol taste like rotten garbage, dairy tastes off, things I didn’t like aren’t as powerful and things I used to love don’t hit like they used to.
I tried retraining smell with different scented oils over the course of a few months, but didn’t really see any difference. Hell, maybe it worked on some things, but the things that it didn’t work for stand out in my mind… maybe that’s cognitive bias.
Other than that, I don’t have any lasting side effects. I don’t even know for sure that it was from Covid. By the time I realized I had a taste change, I tested a few times and never came up positive. I am assuming I had a case and was asymptomatic until the sense change and stopped shedding by the time I tested, but you can develop anosmia/parosmia from other viruses, like the flu, too.
It varies, sometimes comes back within 1 year but different than before, so stuff that one tasted good now tastes bad. I will look for some saved links about this when I get a chance, but of course you can also try web search.
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