So nine days ago (Fri morn to be precise) I woke up, did my usual ablutions, breakfasted, drank coffee and ambled around the internet before logging into work at 9.00am (I telecommute from home). Made my first phone call, and realised I couldn’t talk…my voice had gone!
No sore throat, just no voice. A visit to the doc last Thursday got me a short dose of prednisolone, but it’s done doodly squat to restore my vocal chords, and I’m just about at my wit’s end now. Of course, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid either, so that is pissing me off too!
Anybody here lost their voice for an extended time? How did you cope?
(I’ve got another doc app tomorrow to follow up and I imagine he’ll order further tests etc, so this OP is not requesting medical advice).
This happens to me usually once or twice a year. Usually I find it has something to do with allergies and it is ragweed season this time of year around my parts anyway… HOWEVER… and I am not a doctor but I did have a doctor tell me to do this last go round and it did work …
she told me to take a good ant acid… like prilocec … something like that. that acid reflux is very often the culprit. Now every single time I just take a prescription daily dose of it and knock on some hard wood I haven’t lost my voice again yet.
In my case, the first time it happened for an extended length of time it was expected, as it happened to be due to getting my tonsils out.
I stayed at Grandma’s for a couple of weeks as she lived in the town where the hospital was, back then the town where we lived had no hospital. She had a greyboard which was normally used to take “someone called” notes. I used that board both to draw and to communicate by writing. Now I have one that I trot out occasionally when I have a sore throat. They can be bought in toy stores.
I’ve also seen deaf people, people with sore throats and foreigners use small notebooks. I don’t know whether the gesture for “don’t talk, draw me a map” is universal or not, but it seems to work well.
I lost my voice in 2008 (I think). One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. (OK, maybe not that sudden. But I don’t really talk to myself that much, so it’s hard to say.) I don’t remember how long it took to come back. Days, anyway. And I could swear it didn’t come back to normal for many months.
I once lost my voice due to seasonal allergies, which happens to me about spring out of four, and this time it happened at Gallaudet. I went through my day, and until someone asked me to make a phone call for them around four in the afternoon, I didn’t realize it had happened.
I can talk through laryngitis, although it doesn’t sound great, and it’s tiring, because once it happened to me when I was in a play, and the director taught me how, but my doctor advised me to do it really sparingly, because it can cause vocal nodes, and you end up sounding like a four-pack-a-day smoker.
Your doctor will probably advise you that the more you rest your voice, the faster it will return.
So after a visit to an ENT specialist, it seems that I have Reinke’s Edema (a swelling of the vocal chords) PLUS, just to be interesting, a ‘suspicious growth’ that needs a swift biopsy some time in the next few days.
Fuck.
I suppose it’s karma really…if ever a disorder was more perfectly designed for a TELEMARKETER…it’d be this one!
