Believe it or not, I had a toothache, which tortured me on and off for 9 years. It often made me angry and hence had a very bad influence on my childhood.

The agony which the toothache brought about is still fresh in my memory. When the bad teeth were throbbing with pain, I thought I was hearing some weird noises in my head, but actually the noises were not there. It was just an illusion, and I was scared. When I was asleep, the pain often roused me. Therefore, I ended up with disturbed sleep. A lack of sleep in turn ruined my mood most days.

As a child, due to the toothache, I often behaved in eccentric ways, in the eyes of the folks around me. I tried to suppress the pain by making myself excited. I jumped high, ran fast and shouted loud. They were good ways to get my attention distracted from the excruciating ache.

As much as I suffered from the toothache, my parents thought little of it. Instead of taking me to see a dentist, they tried only some folk remedies to alleviate my suffering. The remedies sometimes worked, but they did not eradicate the root cause. My toothache was never gone completely. It made a dreaded comeback from time to time.

When I was in Grade 7, I eventually persuaded my parents to take me to a dentist. The tooth expert cured, once and for all, the malady that had made my existence a living hell for 9 years. The four bad teeth were finally fixed.

My childhood experience illustrates that we should not be indifferent to a problem just because we have not experienced it for ourselves. My parents had not suffered from a bad toothache themselves, so they never took my dental condition seriously. For me, however, it was worse than Covid-19.

To understand others, we may as well put ourselves in their shoes.