Google trumps Web MD - Kind of

I had this issue earlier in the week. It lasted a few days and seems to be in the process of going away as I type.

Thank the stars!!


Out of the blue, it tasted like I had a spoon in my mouth. I remember years ago when my dad was going through chemo he had trouble eating. Mostly it was because chemo has a tendency to make one sick to their stomach. But another one of his problems was that everything tasted like metal. I never quite understood this.

Until now.

It was like I was sucking on a spoon like a baby sucks a pacifier!


Like any normal person would do in such a case, I turned to the interwebs. Thinking this issue fell in somewhere in the medical category, my first stop was Web MD.

I've used Web MD in the past. Not only to read about various medical stuff, but to use their symptom checker. It's a pretty cool tool and it really helped me out 2 summers ago when my face blew up like a fucking beach ball.

One of the first in the list of possible diagnoses was, in fact, what I had. A severe sinus infection. Which led to a whole other set of problems I won't go into right now. We'll just say certain antibiotics and Benedryl are not my friend!


Back to my issue at hand... I went right to the symptom checker. I entered my basic info - sex and age. I then clicked on the head of the bizarre looking alien-like person, and then proceeded to zoom in on the mouth. In the list of symptoms I clicked on "metallic taste in mouth".

The resulting answers did not answer my questions. In fact they scared the shit out of me!

In case you can't read the possible conditions, I'll spell it out.

• Medication reaction or side-effect
• Antibiotic use
• Poisoning

I am not currently taking any medication nor any antibiotics. And if I was taking something I am allergic to, a metallic taste is definitely not the side-effect. I still cringe at the effects resulting from my sinus infection! It was ugly. No, I was ugly!

So that leaves poisoning.

I tore apart my kitchen, reading every box and container and I did a mental checklist of everywhere I ate in the past week. Nothing out of the ordinary. That calmed my nerves some but then I started to panic. What if there was something in the house I couldn't see that was making me like this? So I went on a quest for a second opinion. In the form of Google.

I won't lie, some of the same possibilities were listed in my search results. That certainly didn't help with the "Oh shit! I've been poisoned and won't live to eat my kids' Halloween candy!" feeling. But I will say that after my reading I will be brushing the hell out of my teeth, drinking more water, and eating everything in sight. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, but since this nasty taste seems to be fading, I'm sticking with the "unknown reason" answer.

I think I now understand why the real doctors hate when patients turn to the interwebs rather than picking up the phone!