![]() ![]() I don’t know if I’ll recover enough to go back onto the speaking circuit regularly. If necessary, I’ll hire voiceover talent when I’m creating screen-capture videos. I’ll schedule coaching, training, teleseminars and webinars around my treatments, relying mostly on guest experts and giving my voice about three weeks recovery time after each $2,500 treatment. My throat has never hurt from SD, and it still doesn’t. I’m taking no medication for my SD and plan to continue with the botox injections about every three months. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons, has SD, too, and describes how it has actually changed his personality. When he appeared on “Larry King Live” three years ago, the blogs and discussion boards were filled with comments the next day from people wondering if he had, among other things, lung cancer. She eventually wrote a book about it called Finding My Voice. In this video, she discusses her four-month absence from her radio show, the diagnosis, the depression that followed, and how she has recovered: NPR talk show host Diane Rehm was diagnosed with SD in 1998. My voice improves little by little each day and, some days, sounds worse than the day before. The day after that, I sounded like Betty Boop or Minnie Mouse on helium. The anticipation was 10 times worse than the treatment. Blumin injected one unit of botox into each vocal chord, through my neck, on March 16. Surgery often isn’t effective.īut for most SD patients, botox injections, into one or both vocal chords, stop the spasms and improve the voice temporarily. Researchers don’t know what causes SD and there’s no cure for it. The spasms often interrupt the sound, squeezing the voice so that words and sentences are broken up. When a person with SD tries to speak, the brain sends signals that cause involuntary spasms in the tiny muscles of the larynx, making the voice sound tight, strangled, breathy, whispery or-in my case-strained. He diagnosed spasmodic dysphonia, a rare voice disorder that starts in the base of the brain and affects about 50,000 people in North America. Joel Blumin, chief of Laryngology and Professional Voice at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In February, my internist referred me to Dr. Maybe those stories in People magazine about Michael Douglas battling throat cancer were the push I needed. On one of my YouTube videos, someone commented, “She sounds like she’s talking from the inside of a toilet.” Several people who bought recordings of teleseminars I hosted said, “You sound like you’re nervous” or “You sound like a little old lady.” Over the years, my voice slowly worsened, and my customers noticed. Eventually, I gave up in frustration and got off the speaking circuit because my voice never improved and because I had become weary of all the travel hassles. I spent a small fortune on expensive throat sprays, Throat Coat teabags, CDs, tapes, books and other sources of information on how to improve my voice. That coaching, which included a series of voice exercises three times a day, didn’t work either. She referred me to a physical therapist for voice. She concluded it was a mild case of acid reflux, even though I didn’t have any of the symptoms. They didn’t help.Īn ear, nose and throat specialist examined me and couldn’t find anything wrong. “Use your diaphragm when you talk.” So I signed up for a series of voice coaching lessons with her. “You talk lazy,” one coach kept chastising me. The voice coaches were beside themselves. I felt it, too, and tried everything I could to make the words come out smooth, but to no avail. They could hear me straining, almost as though I was tightening my throat muscles. My friends in the Wisconsin chapter of the National Speakers Association started asking that more than a decade ago. One of the questions a professional speaker never wants to hear is, “What’s wrong with your voice?” ![]()
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