Fun with damaged nerves

The nervous system is extremely complex and fantastic in every way, and when it gets damaged in some way all sorts of interesting things can happen. Recently diagnosed with MS, I've seen some pretty fascinating things happen to my body and how it interacts with the world. Almost everyone is familiar with those color blindness tests for instance, colored dots that hide a number and if you're color blind you can't see the number, so I'm told. This summer I was at the ophthalmologist because my eyes were giving me a lot of trouble, and when they showed me those multicolored plates, I thought they were broken, or dummies -  I couldn't make out any contours at all. I could still see the different colors of each little dot, I just could no longer make out the patterns. I'm told this is common in cases of inflammation on the optic nerve. I was relieved that when I did the test again a month later, I could actually see some shapes and I think this is something that will mend itself over time.

Another comic effect I experienced was when I lost my memory of taste and smell. Everything tastes the same as it always did, I just have no memories attached to it. Acquired taste was obliterated. So when I walked into the restaurant at work, I couldn't figure out what was being served without peeking. The familiar taste of something I loved as a kid was reduced to a purely intellectual recognition. Coffee... tasted like it did the first time I tasted it, awful. This was a bit of a problem as I was a pretty big coffee drinker. I blamed the sleepiness I felt on caffeine abstinence and after a while I had actually relearned to like coffee.

It took much longer for me to stop hating ice-cream. I got pretty sick after eating a lot of ice-cream when I was 12. The particular flavor that triggered it was chocolate ice-cream, with chocolate crust and hazelnuts. In case you're familiar with Swedish ice-cream, "88:an" is the culprit. After that I very rarely ate ice-cream, never chocolate ice-cream and wouldn't touch ice-cream with hazelnuts in it. Since it's something I don't eat, it took me a while to discover, but that bad memory of ice-cream also lost its hold on me. When I started having difficulties walking, I started inventing things I wanted to do, and one of the things I decided I wanted was to go get an ice-cream on a hot day. I decided I was going to eat ice-cream and like it. And I did. Whether it's a good or bad side effect of MS I'll let each reader decide, but as with the weight loss, I have to say my opinion is that it isn't really worth going through MS just to lose some weight and eat ice-cream, not even when you get to do both at the same time.