Something I’ve always wondered about…

Whenever I flush myself with saline (usually daily), in a beat or two afterwards I can literally taste the saline–just for a moment.

Like a flash across my tongue, but of course I didn’t drink it. I just put it into my bloodstream by IV.

I know I’m not the only one who can do this ‘IV tasting’,

because an IV nurse once commented on it to me, asking me if I tasted the saline after a flush, because he said a number of patients have commented to him on it in the past.

This means, of course, we have some kind of taste mechanism within our body itself–that we all possess some kind of ‘taste baseline’–how we taste daily, but since we’re used to it, we don’t notice it consciously.

I wonder if how we taste to ourselves, is part of our bodies way of knowing when we’re sick…if when we taste differently, that information then becomes part of our generic ‘I don’t feel well’ or ‘I know something is wrong’ that feeling that we tell our doctors.

Because we’re trained to only think of taste as an external process onto the surface our our tongue,

we don’t even think to register its internal information…

Any changes are probably subtle, but I have a feeling these taste changes become part of our overall sense of being…part of why a cancer could sense something was wrong, long before an imaging study showed a tumor–

Perhaps, these patients were literally tasting the cancer cells growing within their body.

Just a thought 🙂