Friday B.S.: Lose Your Senses

Nov 10

AndrewHumor , , Comments Off

Have you ever played that game where you try to decide which of your five senses you would least like to lose? You have played, I know it.

My coworker told me a story the other day about her friend who was in a really bad car accident and essentially lost the majority of his sensory abilities because of a malfunction in his brain due to the accident. That was forty years ago and he has spent his entire life lacking the use of his five senses.

Other than that, I have never heard of a case, anecdotally or otherwise, where someone lost their sense of touch. So that narrows down our choices to the realistic four.

Taste
This might be the least obvious place to start, but I think the loss of taste would devastate me. Just for fun, I let my dentist prescribe a liquid antibiotic that I have to swish in my mouth like mouthwash. It has this weird metallic taste that lingers worse than a coating of whole milk. It is really inhumanly gross.

I only have to take the stuff twice a day for two weeks, but I found out right away that it mixes with the other fluids I consume and the flavor of everything is tainted. By the second day, I was aware of something was seriously wrong. My taste buds seemed to have disappeared.

Everything I ate went down well, but I literally had no sense of what it tasted like. I could mostly discern sweet from sour, but everything went down my belly without any food flavor at all. And what I did taste with every bite had that metallic flavor of the prescription. It is exactly what I imagine the T-1000 tastes like, if you were consuming his malleable liquid shell. So for the week’s grocery trip, I bought all sorts of things that generally have no flavor on their own, spaghetti noodles and broccoli and Ritz crackers. I can survive until Thanksgiving and then the antibiotics go into the garbage.

Smell
So they say, smell is tied to taste so if you can’t live without one, you can’t live without the other. When I was younger, my sense of smell was actually transmitted through my finger tips, so I could always distinctly smell what I was touching. (I am so setting you up for a poop joke right here.)

I highly recommend my favorite website dedicated to smells http://www.senseofsmell.org/. The glossary of smell disorders alone cracks me up. Phantosmia is the presence of smells with no discernable external vapor. That’s right. It is a smell that you made up. Hypochondriacs, add it to the list!

Sight
The problem with conceptualizing its loss is that most of us live with visual stimulation every day and take it for granted. It is not like you can turn off the lights and try to navigate around your house. Instead, try covering your eyes and then cross a busy street with just the aural clues at your disposal. (Frankly, just crossing an intersection with the visual clues is frightening enough.) Or try watching a two hour movie without opening your eyes.

My horror about blindness is waiting for the bus on Moody Street and wondering if the bus that stops in front of me is the one I really want to take. I mean, most bus drivers will call out the route number, but that one time that the bus driver doesn’t, and I’m speeding along my way to Dedham.

Hearing
I don’t listen very well anyway, so this wouldn’t be much of a loss.

(Okay, insensitive joke, but you could almost see it coming.)

My nomination for the sense I would least like to lose is sight.

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