Headlines
As reported by Men's Health, March 7, 2011.
The Dangers of Losing Your Voice: The Silent Health Threat
By Colin McEnroe
This past summer, Hartford, Connecticut, was blessed with a string of lovely Monday nights for the free jazz concerts in the city's central park. Some friends and I fell into the habit of biking in from our suburb and then biking home in a peloton of mild anxiety as we dashed through a problematic part of the city around 10 p.m.
In the waning hours of the final Monday in July, my friends were tarrying to chat. The park had emptied, and I wanted to leave before the people who stand in front of a certain Capitol Avenue bar got into a bottle-throwing mood. I pedaled my bike forward and called loudly over my shoulder, "Let's go." And something went. Something gave in my voice. Just as you probably can tell the difference between turning your ankle and severely spraining it, I could tell I had hurt my voice in a significant way.
Think about all you have done and all you will do with your voice. You have seduced lovers and soothed children and pressed your case in arguments. It's so much more personal than your knee, but you react more casually to a voice problem than a knee injury. You have your eyes checked, and you notice changes in your hearing; but your voice can be froggy for weeks while you do nothing about it.
I was different. I was part of that small group of almost literally squeaky wheels who push for treatment. We can't afford not to.
For more than a decade, my principal source of income has been speaking on the radio. You can sound funny if your last name is Terkel or Magliozzi. Otherwise, it's a parade of honeyed tones. I pictured my tragic life as a barkless dog in the alleyways of radio. During that time my voice grew weaker and tired more easily.
So I picked out an ear, nose, and throat doc to stalk. You know how that goes, when you're trying for any first available specialist appointment. They give you a date so far in the future that the universe will have been consumed by dark matter by the time help arrives. As one must do, I made special entreaties, having U.S. senators and papal envoys call on my behalf, until I had an appointment a few days hence.
I did it because I hoped I would realize my dream of having somebody spray anesthetic into my nostrils and stick a tiny camera into my nose and lower it, like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, into my throat.
Which is what happened.
Voice medicine, if you can access it, is pretty high-tech these days. Denis Lafreniere, M.D., from the University of Connecticut, and his team started out by taking my vocal fingerprints. They used microphones and sensors to create a series of digital impressions of the way I sounded. This allowed them to track my progress over successive visits.
Then came the Tom Cruise "nose cam."
Have you noticed the tendency among physicians to show you all the stuff they can see with their scopes? They paid for this equipment, and they're going to make sure you understand exactly how Tron they are. The next time you are abducted and probed by aliens, they will insist on showing you jpegs of your anus.
So right after Dr. Lafreniere scoped my voice box, he wanted me to look at the big pink wet thing I had blissfully been ignoring all my life. On the television screen, it looked like a fetal half-chicken sired by Jabba the Hutt.
Did you know you don't have vocal cords anymore? Doctors now call them vocal folds, two lips of complex tissue that come together in your throat and then are blown apart in a wave of vibration by the air surging up beneath them. On one of my vocal folds was a tiny little beak, a protrusion with two edges.
"That appears to be granuloma, and it's probably caused by reflux," Dr. Lafreniere said.
A granuloma is a benign growth, a cluster of cells your body produces when it's irritated.
His solution was to treat my reflux as if it were Katrina instead of a summer thundershower. I would start the war against GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) by taking the drug omeprazole at levels that would send shock waves through insurance company prescription-approval call centers in Lahore. I would also take famotidine (Pepcid to you). He gave me the standard reflux lifestyle-change sheet. No caffeine. No alcohol. No spicy foods. Smaller portions. No late dinners. Watch your weight.
Basically, the "why live?" diet.
Don't get me started on reflux. Among people over 40, reflux is one of those maladies everybody just suddenly realized they had.
I had seen that lifestyle-change sheet before, in the hands of other doctors, but I'd made only faltering attempts to follow it.
This time, reader, I married it.
I wanted my voice back, and I was prepared to go to extreme lengths to retrieve it. I gave up coffee. (I've worked in newspapers and radio all my life and have seen times when my body was 23 percent coffee.) I switched to one cup of tea a day. I allowed myself only one glass of red wine a day. I did all the other stuff on the sheet and started biking to work.
I lost 15 pounds in a matter of months.
"This is more of an indictment of your former lifestyle than a compliment to your current one," my regular doctor said.
But the bigger test was still to come.
"I doubt it's only the reflux," Dr. Lafreniere said. "It might have started out that way, but usually people fall into other speaking and singing habits to compensate for what's wrong. They make the other problem even worse."
After almost 20 years in radio and a lifetime of running my mouth, I would have to learn to talk.
I started ducking out of work and driving to the University of Connecticut Health Center once a week to make idiotic noises with my speech pathologist, Patricia Doyle.
One of my key noises was the "trill," produced by holding my lips loosely together and blowing air though them, like a kid making a motorboat sound. The trick is to sustain the trill at the same level over the course of one full breath. There are voiceless trills, trills with medium voice, trills that alternate high and low pitch and—the quadruple twisting layout of trills—alternating from voiceless to voiced and back, never losing that blubbing sound.
This is all harder than you think. Put down the magazine and try a couple. Did someone walk into the room and conclude that you have a pervasive developmental disorder? That happens to me all the time. The worst was a quiet Sunday afternoon when I took my dog to a deserted schoolyard bordered by woods. Utterly alone, I started practicing "tongue releases," which involve sticking out your tongue as far as it will go and then saying a list of words like "till," "town," "lash," and "style." Halfway through, I realized that a guy had walked up behind me with his dog. He was a man I sort of knew. A judge, as it happens. His face wore a look that said, "If this were a competency hearing, I'd be taking your keys away."
My voice is slowly coming back.
In mid-December, about five months from the night in the park when I blew out my voice, I was at a benefit party celebrating a friend's triumph over heart disease. The band wanted me to come on stage and sing Elvis Costello's (heart-appropriate) "Pump It Up."
And I explained that I couldn't possibly do that. The effort of talking above the party noise was already straining my voice. Roaring my way through a quasi-punk anthem could easily undo weeks of work. It was too big a risk.
I'm just kidding. Of course I sang.
And of course it screwed up my voice.
But I got up the next morning and started unkinking the knots. I know how to do that now.
I mean, I care about my voice, but we're only here for a short time, you know? Sometimes you just have to rock 'n' roll and then buy your voice flowers the next day.