Struggling with the same problem myself Alpaca. I have two problems, one is the difficulty holding weight and the other is the pain in the raw throat. Its causing me a lot more stress than I realised, and the doc put me on a mild anxiety drug for it. She also did a review of my pain meds, and again reinforced that it is more important right now to get calories down than it is to be in a rush to get back to a normal diet. If it means more "thickshakes" then thats how it is, at least until the throat heals. But everything I've read and been told about taste is that it takes months to come back properly, and probably won't come back exactly the same ever again. We just have to be patient and keep things ticking over in the meantime.

As a side note, in my experiments with what food tastes ok, I found a tinned pea and ham soup I liked. I knocked off a 500g tin of it, which is a lot for me right now. Its not very high in calories, but the taste was there (probably because of the way it smells, I tend to taste through smell at the moment). The wife will do a proper pea and ham soup in the slow cooker, and it will have more calories and nutrients than the canned version.