Do some of your sensory issues change?

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I was just curious because I have always worn shoes around the house because I can't stand bits of dirt on my feet. The past couple of weeks I've noticed that it doesn't bother me as much. Do things like that ever change for you?

Not for me. My touch issues have been pretty consistent for 20-30 years at this point. Pretty used to them by now.

When I was a kid, just about any kind of injury was extremely painful. Something as minor as a paper cut was excruciating.

I remember sustaining a minor cut to my shoulder in my mid teens and being amazed that it didn't hurt.

Of course, it's possible that they didn't hurt so much as I just expected them to hurt and reacted to that expectation.

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I remember as a kid having an exquisite sense of smell and taste. One of my favorite foods was macaroni with a little tomato juice on top. I could have eaten that all the time. In fact, after I graduated from college and was living on my own for the first time, and consequently cooking for myself, I ate macaroni with tomato juice several nights a week.

I went to an Indian restaurant once and just the smells of all the spices was seriously overpowering. I tried several things, but the only thing I could eat was the naan.

Then I got sick for a week or so once with what appeared to be a pretty bad case of the flu. When I got better, my sense of smell was nearly gone. All of a sudden, I couldn't tell any difference in flavor between, for example, a hamburger and a plate of Chinese food. Nothing had any flavor at all. Except for the texture, macaroni and barbecue beef tasted pretty much the same -- 100% bland.

Then I was driving down a street on my motorcycle and saw an Indian restaurant and, on a whim, went in and ate. Instead of being completely repulsed like the previous time, this time the food was absolutely great. It had flavor -- not much, but enough that I could actually smell and taste it. I started going to other Indian restaurants and liked just about anything I ate.

Over time, my sense of smell and taste seems to have come back a little bit. A hamburger now has a slightly different flavor than Chinese food. But macaroni with tomato sauce on top, once my nearly daily dietary staple has slipped to something I eat maybe once every three or four months and then mainly because it's so easy to fix, not because it has any flavor at all.

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I've always had excellent hearing. People often don't realize just how much I do hear -- I prefer to act like I didn't hear things that weren't intended for me. I still tend to hear every other little sound around me, too. I have no idea if my hearing is normal or extrasensitive.

What I do know is that every once in a while, my hearing really starts to bother me. All of a sudden, it is like someone turned the volume up to maximum using a really crappy set of speakers. When that happens, I have trouble distinguishing various sounds apart at all. When I hear someone talking, there isn't that much difference if they are across the table or across the room. All I want to do is to get out of there as soon as is possible.

I somehow doubt that this is normal. At least, I've never seen any discussions about it anywhere. I'd think that if it was normal, I'd have seen something about it in one place or another.