We all experience our taste buds in action daily; during mouth and neck cancer radiation therapy your taste buds are burnt off losing all or partial taste sensations. In this, I mean as per the diagram your ability to taste bitter, sour, sweat, and salty and until I had cancer treatment I was not aware of the taste called "Umami "
As described in Episode 17, I completely lost all my taste sensors (buds) on my tongue because the radiowaves from the radiation treatment were projected through the front teeth area, my left top-level teeth area, and rear right-hand teeth area focused on where my cancer growing in my tonsils. (details Episode 8 on radiation treatment).
When my nasal gastro tube was removed after 9 months I slowly reintroduced foods that were Pureed so I could swallow. It was a devastating blow to me to find I could not taste the foods I was eating and because of it being pureed, it had no texture; all I could go by was color! I did not know what the food was unless I was told! I must admit this was a hard setback which affected me greatly.
"THE WHAT IF's" Taste Bud questions Will it Ever Come Back?, How Long? Will it be the Same? Will I ever be normal again? ANSWER- YES, IN TIME!
Like everything in the process of trying to first go into remission and ultimately beat Throat/mouth cancer it is one step at a time. You have to bear in mind that chemotherapy to stop the spread of cancer and radiotherapy therapy have to suppress everything to kill the cancer in doing so they have to (in Layman's Terms) bring you to the point of complete body shutdown then STOP and let your immune system reboot itself. (Amazing skill and technology shown by Specialist)
Tip. There are some great health side benefits from this discussed in Episodes to come.
Now to Umami, The very first thing that I could taste came unexpectedly and gave me quite a shock, we where researching different foods trying to see what I could swallow and we decided to try rice to see if it was possible. The rice I always said had little taste so we decided to try sushi. To my surprise, I could taste the Salmon Dipped in soy and wasabi! The Wasabi did burn a bit so I minimized the amount and there I was TASTING FOOD AGAIN! What a Milestone ! Finally a joyous occasion after months of suffering.(To this day Smoked Salmon with soy sauce is still my "goto" meal).
I was so intrigued by this I decided to find out more Foods that tasted similar, which is when I found out about the Taste of Umami and that we all had the receptors. To put it in my terms it is a salty-meaty-savory taste others may disagree I suggest you try it and draw your own description. ONE THING IT WORKED
From here I discovered Umami Taste was in cheeses like Parmesan, most smoked fish, Japanese Shittake mushrooms, a lot of sauces (Which I needed), and of course "beefy" type soup. There are others these were the ones I could taste at that time. The makeup I found was that it was An Amino Acid called Glutamate which opens your taste receptors (buds) thus enhancing the taste, The Bad press it receives is that it is also present in MSG so its abuse in overuse in cooking is obvious. I was concerned about its use as I have heart disease as well and was worried about its salt content, but digging deeper I found that the salt taste wasn't directly related to processed salt in the form we know it but in fact "it "reduced the need to apply "salt" to achieve the taste!
The next Episode the Second Taste Returns.
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Welcome, I hope my blog helps in some way to cope with cancer.I am a survivor remember; One Day at a Time;
Regards
Phil on a Mission