This is me toasting everyone here who has helped keep me going even though I couldn't taste anything. I am now down to about 5 cigarettes a day, which if you knew me you would realize was a miracle. No hyperbole, just a miracle.
My chronic sinusitis is gone, vanished. I'm at the stage now of coughing up the old crap that gets loosened in your lungs when you stop smoking analogs, but even that is no biggie. I am able to take deeper breaths now, too and can finally aspire to those long inhales I see the you tubers doing.
The taste buds are staging a comeback. I accidentally "swallowed" a drag, coughed a bit and "chewed" around on it and all of a sudden there was a huge burst of taste in the very back and on the outer edges of my tongue. It was so delicious that I spent the next 5 minutes smushing vapes around my mouth and managed to recreate the taste. I am so not believing this. I had already lost hope because of the replies I had gotten that taste is just smell and that I should exhale through my nose, etc. But I now realize that even though I enjoyed the smell and even the blunted taste so much more than a cigarette, I was missing out on what makes vaping so much more than a way to quit smoking. I am vaping Pure Vapor's Lemon Creme Puff which I had ordered from Nikhil with 3 extra spoons of sweetener, extra flavor, and a bit of tingle. I had been disappointed that once again extra flavor was just something I had wasted money on, but I am now so glad I did. This flavor is UNBELIEVABLE. My mother learned to cook and bake in France and Switzerland as a young woman, and makes lemon bars that are nowhere else to be found. This flavor is so good that it was like eating, literally, one of her bars. I taste the sweetened lemon, the creaminess, and even the pastry. It burst on my tongue (the side of it, lol) like a little lemon delicious. I am now going to vape the crap out of my Strawberry Shortcake, and the other fruit thingies I have. I am also going to re-order from Kick Bass, which I have finished, but to which my tongue could not do justice at all. The bakery fruit flavors were too strong on pastry and almost absent on the fruit, which I always realized was my fault, and which is why I won't even consider posting any recommendations.
I am now extra geeked and will have to restrain myself from annoying with all of this excitement. I'm going to fish on the forum for other people's stories about their taste buds and will also share what I have found out. I wonder if I would have found out about the back sides of the tongue thing if I hadn't been half-quit, or if the back was just protected all these 30 years.
This is what everyone is raving about, and rightly so. I am forever grateful to all the inventors, modifying, taste-testing, and promoters of vaping. Wow.
