When the bad feeling passed and I went to explain what had happened, the shock came: my voice wouldn’t come out. In the car, back home, I wrote to communicate with him. I asked him to call an ENT I knew to find out what we had to do. The doctor said that my voice would return, that I could rest assured.
My parents didn’t want me to return to São Paulo because of the pandemic, but as time passed, I became increasingly distressed. I like to talk, to put my feelings out and my voice didn’t come out.
Ten days after the accident, I went to the doctor because I was still completely voiceless. He examined me and, once again, said he would be back. That would take about 10 days. Again, it didn’t get better. At the third consultation, he said that the situation was more serious.
He told me that he hadn’t been able to see it before, but that I had paralysis on one side of my vocal folds. It’s as if a little piece of them was always open, without moving. And since it didn’t close, the sound didn’t come out. I started crying a lot during the appointment.
I was very scared of that diagnosis and decided to look for other doctors. I went to three, and each one gave me a different solution to the problem. They were always completely different and invasive surgeries. They didn’t even know if my voice would come back. One of the specialists told me he had never seen an injury like mine from trauma. It was common to see cases like mine among singers.
Among the three treatment options they presented to me, I chose the least invasive: I would be intubated and the doctor would apply hyaluronic acid to the paralyzed vocal cords, to make them ‘chubbier’. With that, they would close and I would be able to make sounds. And even then, I would need to do a lot of vocal therapy to be able to speak again — almost like bodybuilding to make them strong again.
