I just learned to appreciate the adage “you don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” For the past three weeks, I’ve gone through life almost deaf.

It started one morning when I was shaken from my sleep by a loud rumbling, popping noise in my head. A few days prior to that, I had developed the symptoms of a cold, so my first thought was that the cold had reached my head. Then, lying in bed, I realized it was something more serious. My head felt like it had been encased in a concrete block. I couldn’t hear a thing.

When people talked to me, I could only hear muffled sounds. I couldn’t hear food cooking on the stove, couldn’t hear the dogs barking, couldn’t hear the car starting, couldn’t hear the alarm clock, couldn’t hear the telephone ring, couldn’t hear the wind blow, and I couldn’t hear the noisy shoppers as I walked through our busy base shopping mall (this last one was not so bad, though). I spent nearly three weeks in underwater silence.

I finally went to the doctor last week. She could not determine what it was, but prescribed some nasal sprays and allergy tablets. She also found wax buildup in my left ear and in the process of cleaning it out, pulled out a nasty little ball of what I will only describe as ‘stuff.’

My hearing is almost back to normal now, but that incident gave me something to think about. We too often take for granted normal things like hearing, seeing, walking, talking, not realizing how important these normal acts are. We wake up every morning assuming that everything is the same as it was the day before. We don’t even think about the possibility that we might not be able to hear or see or walk or talk or any of a hundred things we do to get us through the day.

Life is precious and fragile. Don’t take it or any part of it for granted. Appreciate what you have because you never know when you might loose it.