The Voice
There is a version of this story where the voice is a side note—one complication among many in an experience that had no shortage of them. A temporary setback, eventually resolved, mentioned in passing alongside the hair loss and the tremors and the rest of what the medications and the procedures took and gave back in their own time.
That is not how it felt.
Mercy West
The voice went in late September 2024, at Mercy West, somewhere in the middle of the AFib cascade that had brought everything to a head. The assumption at the time was acid damage—the vomiting that accompanied the arrhythmia episodes, the throat taking the brunt of it. A reasonable guess, the kind of thing that heals on its own in a week or two.
It didn’t heal. It got worse.
By the time I was transferred to The Christ Hospital via Air Care, the voice had deteriorated beyond hoarseness into something more fundamental—a raspy whisper that people in the same room had difficulty understanding. Not over a bad phone connection. In the room, standing next to me. Ordering food became an exercise in repetition and frustration. Phone calls were essentially impossible. The specific daily indignities of a voice that cannot do what a voice is supposed to do accumulated steadily, and underneath all of them was the thing I could not rationalize away: I had already lost so much in the preceding weeks, and losing the voice was simply too much.
The nephews thought the Batman voice was hilarious. They told me I had to say “I’m Batman,” and to be fair, it did sound exactly like the traditional raspy Batman voice. This became the running joke at both hospitals—staff picking it up, running with it, getting mileage out of it in the way that hospital humor tends to do when everyone involved understands that laughing is preferable to the alternative. Dark humor is not optional in a situation like this. It is load-bearing. Nothing is off limits, and if the Batman voice was what we had to work with, then we were going to work with it.
Underneath the jokes, though, sat something the humor could not quite reach. Life without song is not life at all. That is not a sentiment or a preference—it is a fact about who I am, at the level of identity, the way the intellect is. When the voice failed to self-correct as the weeks passed, despair arrived in a form that was quieter and more corrosive than anything that had come before it.
The ENT
The ENT surgeon recognized the problem immediately when he first examined me and wanted confirmation with proper equipment before committing to a verdict. What followed was one of the more genuinely uncomfortable experiences of an already uncomfortable hospitalization—not painful, but deeply unnatural in a way that required deliberate effort to manage.
A flexible tube, inserted up through the nose and down through the nasal cavity, positioned to observe the vocal cords directly. The instruction was to make sounds—a variety of them, different pitches and vowels—while the scope recorded what it found. Containing the instinctive panic required real work. This is not something the body accepts easily, having something threaded through its passages, and the mind had to be brought firmly to bear on the reality that it was necessary and temporary and would be over soon enough.
The results were unambiguous. Left vocal cord: paralyzed. Not reduced function, not partial movement—the cord did not move at all. It was frozen in an open position, which explained the rasp and the breathiness and the complete inability to project any volume. The right cord was working normally, doing the work of both, imperfectly. The cause, as best as the team could determine, was the swan catheter inserted at Mercy West during the initial hospitalization. The recurrent laryngeal nerve—the nerve that controls vocal cord movement—runs in close proximity to the insertion path, and a nick during a procedure performed under difficult conditions on a patient in acute distress is the working theory. The honest answer is that the certainty isn’t complete, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
The prognosis covered a wide range of outcomes: might self-correct within months, might take up to a year, might not correct at all. Options on the table included injection of a filler material into the paralyzed cord to bulk it up and move it closer to center, improving closure. Surgery. Speech therapy. Each with its own timeline and tradeoffs. The thyroidectomy decision—made with one vocal cord already gone and a real risk of damaging the other—is documented in Out of the Frying Pan and belongs to that piece. What belongs here is what came after the ENT appointment: the specific knowledge that the thing most essential to the life I wanted to live might simply be gone.
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
In the window between the ENT visit and the thyroidectomy, alone in the hospital room, Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” came on.
I tried to sing along.
I cried. Alone in the room, with a Billy Joel song playing and a voice that couldn’t sing it, I cried in a way I can hardly describe and certainly had not expected. The man who had held the line through the AFib cascade and the cardioversions and the Impella surgery and the listing, who had made his peace with dying and chosen the suffering of the transplant route without fear, found himself undone by the inability to sing a verse of a song he had known for decades. This was not weakness. It was the specific thing that the intellect cannot negotiate away—the loss that operates below analysis, below the rational framework, in territory where reason has nothing to offer and the only honest response is grief. The intellect had held the line through everything else. Here, it simply had no jurisdiction.
I had already lost so much. The voice was the loss that broke through.
Living Without It
The months that followed were an exercise in adaptation and waiting. Kabbalah classes attempted from the hospital bed, communicating by text when speaking wasn’t possible. The social diminishment of not being understood accumulating steadily—the repetition, the straining faces, the phone calls abandoned mid-attempt. The specific frustration of having something important to say and no reliable means of saying it.
Sherrill, throughout, was certain in the way that Sherrill is certain about things—not cautiously optimistic but declarative. It would come back, in no uncertain terms, and I would be singing again. The universe gets told what is going to happen with confidence, and it happens. My own position was more measured. I felt like it would return. I also knew there was a genuine chance it would not, and the ENT had been honest enough to say so, and I was not going to pretend otherwise to myself. I held both things at once: the hope and the realistic possibility that the hope was misplaced.
The Therapist’s Video
A few months after discharge, I attended a couple of sessions of voice therapy. The therapist used a different approach than the ENT—a wand rather than a nasal tube—and was able to observe the vocal cords directly as I produced sounds. She recorded what she found and showed me the footage.
The cord was moving.
Not fully, not normally—but moving. The self-correction that had been described as possible, that I had hoped for without quite letting myself depend on, was visibly underway. I watched my own vocal cord do something it hadn’t done in months, right there on the screen in front of me. I realize that for some people, a medical video of a vocal cord in motion is a clinical detail. For me, in that moment, it was the best news I had received since the transplant itself. The thing I had been told might never happen was demonstrably happening.
The therapist reiterated the range of possible outcomes—might heal close to normal, might not, might land somewhere in between—but the direction was clear. She gave me exercises designed to encourage the movement and build cord strength. They felt unnatural, though. Odd in a way that didn’t match how the voice is supposed to work. I did them at first and then gradually stopped doing them in the prescribed form, replacing them with my own version: singing specific songs, modulating the voice through the same range the exercises targeted but in a form that made actual sense to me. Working the instrument the way it was built to be worked, on terms that fit.
Little by little, carefully, always stopping when strain arrived, the voice began to find its way back.
March 2025
Sometime in early March—roughly six months after the voice first went—I stopped sounding like a lifelong smoker in his late seventies. The rasp was still present at the edges, but the voice had returned to something recognizable as mine. One of the first things I did was record myself singing Hashkiveinu—the evening prayer that has accompanied so much of the experience documented in this series—and Do Re Mi from The Sound of Music. Not for anyone else. For the evidence of it.
The work continued beyond that point—breath control, vocal range, the finer dimensions of what the voice can actually do when it’s fully available. In the end, the top range extended upward by two semitones beyond where it had been before any of this happened. Not restored to the previous baseline. Somewhere beyond it.
What the Strangers Said
A few months after my voice returned, I was walking in the park, singing, and a stranger stopped me to say I had a beautiful voice. A year out, the same thing happened again—an unsolicited compliment from someone with no context, no stake in the answer, no reason to say it except that it was true.
These may seem like minor moments. They were not minor. A stranger has no agenda. A stranger is not being kind or careful or diplomatic. A stranger heard something real and named it.
After the months of the raspy whisper, after the Batman jokes and the phone calls abandoned and the food orders repeated three times, after sitting alone in a hospital room crying through a Billy Joel song I couldn’t sing—after all of it, a stranger in a park said: beautiful voice.
That was enough.
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