You Don't Know What You Can't Hear

I’ve had a pretty significant hearing loss for many years. There are times when I need someone’s help to even know there’s a problem.

I had an overnight guest at my house recently, and when she joined me in the kitchen in the morning, she said she’d heard an intermittent beeping sound all night long. She managed to sleep, in part by taking out her own hearing aids. But that morning, she could hear it again. I didn’t hear anything. We never found where it was coming from.

After she left, I called maintenance at my apartment complex, and the maintenance guy discovered, pretty quickly, that it was my smoke alarm telling me its battery was dead. I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure that out on my own.