Hi @longboat1 and welcome to Connect. My experience with taste is it never was the same after radiation but I would just say it is different, not bad, just different. I found tastes I formally shunned whilst others I have gone away from, particularly very sweet desserts.
Dry throat is still an issue more than twenty years out. Phlegm was a few years until it seemed to clear up or I just got used to it and it slowly went away. It took two full years for about eighty percent of the healing process and about a half dozen more for some lingering nerve effects to vanish. I sneeze brought me to tears for roughly ten years due to the pain shock. I'm OK now.
As for you, there is a lot of good throat pain and meds advice on these feeds, certainly more current than what I had in the first decade of this century. Good healing.

Thanks for the reply.
I hope things will keep getting better and better for you.