Can you hear me NOW?

I've been nearly two weeks without a voice. Helps me understand those who are permanently stricken in such a way, so maybe it is God's way of helping me shut up a little.

I'm learning ALOT about medicine. The voice is another strange twist of science. I visited a voice-doctor, on Monday, someone in the Ear-Nose-Throat specialty who sub-specializes in Throat. Great guy, incredibly kind and knowledgeable. Only because of my friendship with another doc, and doc's wife, did I get in at all...his next opening was two weeks away. People are so kind to me in my "condition" it gives me goosebumps.

Anyway, he snaked a tv camera through my nose and down my throat to take a look. What we learned is that there is a muscle alongside each of one's vocal cords that moves the cord back and forth so that they touch and vibrate when we speak. The vocal cords are like sails in the wind, they don't move themselves back and forth, but when in position they do their job. Somehow, the nerve that feeds this muscle on one side is not working...so that the muscle sits too far from the other side of my larynx, leaving its vocal cord just flapping in the wind when I try to talk, rather than connecting with its partner on the other side and vibrating correctly. Visually, it was pretty fascinating to watch tv.

From there, diagnosis is more difficult. What we expect is that I caught a virus, a relative of whooping cough, somehow in the last two weeks. It shows up by centering in that nerve, which could be "infected" with this virus anywhere along about an 18 inch track, as it leaves the spine, circles around a bit and rises to your vocal cords. (There is medical nomenclature for all this, but I don't remember that stuff.) Anyway, we had another CT scan, to try and figure out where along the pathway it was infected by this virus.

There isn't really anything to do with a neurological virus like that, except wait it out. That's 3-6 months. YIKES...I whispered...

Of course, as modern medicine would have it, there is a procedure to fix my larynx until the nerve recovers. So on Monday morning at 7:30, I had a procedure that was new to me. The doc took a syringe and injected collagen (yes, the same as Anglina's lips and their pout) into the little muscle. That enlarges it back into its appropriate place, helps the "sails" of the vocal cords to touch. He says it is magical. You walk in without a voice and walk out 40 minutes later as if none of this past week ever happened. Well, it wasn’t quite like that for me. I’m still hoarse, though I can make sounds…so I'm going back to see why I'm not "normal" although no one should be surprised by now at that...

It lasts for 3-4 months, at which time either the nerve is healthy again...or I get another injection of collagen. So just call me the celebrity cancer patient....! (And for you Fubarian brothers, "NO" he did not ask if he could inject me anywhere else....!)