On Dec. 27, 2023, I spent the afternoon playing mahjong. That was to be the last day I was able to hear the pleasing click-clacking sound of those plastic tiles as they are tumbled and mixed on the table.

I came home from my mahjong game that afternoon and reported to my husband that I had a sore throat. Darn, the start of another cold. That turned into a very bad cold, with an incessantly runny nose, sneezing and congestion. As I talked on the phone with my sister on my way to run errands, she urged me to take a COVID test. I could not understand why, since I had no cough, no loss of taste or smell, no shortness of breath. But I acquiesced to her wisdom — though not before I finished shopping the many aisles of Target, unknowingly spreading the virus to my fellow shoppers. Sure enough, the COVID test was positive. That was the beginning of the end — the end of me being able to hear the mahjong tiles, the delighted squeals of my grandson and the high-pitched tweets of the songbirds returning for spring.

My COVID suffering started with congestion in my nose and sinuses. Soon that congestion spread to my ears, causing the excruciating pain I remembered from childhood ear infections. One of my eardrums ruptured in the middle of the night. Then it was visits to my family practice doctor and to the ear, nose and throat doctor. My ears were plugged, full of pressure and pain. The ENT eventually put tubes in my eardrums, the kind our children had as infants. I went through two courses of prednisone pills, two courses of antibiotics, three courses of prednisone eardrops and, finally, an injection of prednisone into my inner ear. My middle ear, the part of the ear right behind the eardrum, has cleared up. But still, I cannot hear. The audiograms show that my hearing is normal in the lower ranges. It is the upper ranges that show a downward slope.