No jokes today on “serious Sunday.”
Many of you asked about my voice. As I’ve explained in this blog, about two years ago I suddenly acquired a bizarre and exotic voice problem called a spasmodic dysphonia. I couldn’t speak for about 18 months unless I was on stage doing my public speaking, or alone, or singing. The rest of the time my vocal cords would clench and I could barely get out a word.
Other people with this condition report the same bizarre symptoms. We can also often speak perfectly in funny British accents but not in our own voices. We can speak after we have laughed or yawned. Sometimes it helps to pinch our noses or cover our ears. I found I can talk okay if I stretch my head back and look at the ceiling or close my eyes. And we can all sing and hum just fine.
It looks like a whacky mental problem, except that it comes on suddenly and everyone has a similar set of symptoms regardless of their psychological situation at the time. (It’s not as if we all have post partem depression or just got back from war.)
The only widely-recognized treatment involves regular Botox shots through the front of the neck and directly into the vocal cords. But because the Botox takes some time to reach full impact, then immediately starts to wear off, you only have your best voice about half of that time. And the shots themselves are no picnic. I was hoping for a better solution, especially since I couldn’t do my public speaking after Botox injections because it weakened my voice too much to project on stage.
One day, long after the last Botox shot had worn off, I was repeating a nursery rhyme at home. I found that I could speak a poem fairly well even though I couldn’t speak a normal sentence. Suddenly something “clicked” in my brain and I could speak perfectly. Just like that. It was amazing.
[Note: I doubt the choice of poem had anything to do with it, but it was Jack Be Nimble.]
Many of you asked if it lasted. It did last, for several days. Then I got a cold, my throat got funky, I had to speak different because of the cold, and lost it. After the cold wore off, it took a few weeks to get back to my current “okay” voice.
At the moment I can speak okay most of the time in quiet conversation. In other words, if there is no background noise, I can talk almost as if I never had the problem. That’s a HUGE improvement over the past.
But I still can’t speak in noisy environments. That’s common with this condition, and it has nothing to do with the need to speak loudly to talk over the noise. It has something to do with the outside sound coming into my brain and somehow disabling my speech function. If I cover my ears, I can speak almost normally.
Unfortunately for me, the world is a noisy place. So outside of conversations with my family at home, I still can’t have a normal conversation.
Today I am flying to Los Angeles to spend a week with Dr. Morton Cooper. He claims to be able to cure this problem completely – in many if not most cases – using his own brand of intensive voice exercises and feedback. I’ve communicated directly with several people who say that he did indeed fix their voices. The medical community’s reaction to his decades of curing this problem is that they say each of his cures is really just a case of a person who was misdiagnosed in the first place, since spasmodic dysphonia is incurable BY DEFINITION. But many of his cures have involved patients referred by the top specialists in the field of spasmodic dysphonia. So if they are all misdiagnosed, that would be a story in itself. Maybe I’m lucky enough to be misdiagnosed too.
I’m not sure how much blogging I will be able to do this week. I’ll let you know at the end of the week just how it went. It’s not a sudden cure, and would involve continued voice exercises to speak in the “correct” way, but I am told to expect significant progress after a week.
Wish me luck.