"It Hurts to Hum" by Mary Norris
This story from our archives is featured in Epiphany’s My Last White Boyfriend anthology, available now for sale from Ristretto Books, which collects the last 20 years of Epiphany’s greatest prose hits.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008, was an eventful day at the otorhinolaryngologist’s. I have thrush, a sulcus, and possible spasmodic dysphonia. I am to see a voice therapist named Frizzi on March 31st. I really liked the throat doctor. His name is Radu Lucian Sulica, and he has a kind, asymmetrical face with thick black eyebrows.
I told him about my experience twenty years ago with the eminent laryngologist Dr. Friedrich Brodnitz. I had consulted Dr. Brodnitz for chronic hoarseness. He was very old and thin and moved like a praying mantis. He kept a gas jet in his office, which he lit with an ordinary pack of matches and used to warm a small mirror before inserting it into the back of my throat to view the larynx. (Otherwise, my breath would steam up the mirror.) Dr. Brodnitz, who spoke with a strong German accent, had tried to cure my hoarseness with a method that I could tell sounded quaint to Dr. Sulica, who was “old school.” He instructed me to chew, or reproduce the motion of chewing, like a child eating with her mouth open and talking at the same time. The idea was that if you used your throat for its original purpose—to ingest food—you could trick the vocal cords into relaxing while using the throat for the more sophisticated purpose of speech.
Dr. Sulica does not have an open flame in his office. Instead he looked at my larynx through my nose. He puffed some anesthetic up my nostrils, plugged a huge black battery box into a machine, and snaked a long black tube with a camera on the tip down my left nostril. My larynx appeared on a screen to my left. It’s very intimate looking at your vocal cords with a stranger: they look like labia. “Say ‘eeeee,’ ” he said, and with great discomfort I produced a strained vowel sound, again and again. Once, trying to get a good look, he made me gag.
The immediate reason for my appointment with the throat doctor was an itchy throat. I belong to an acappella singing group, and my voice had begun to seem more than usually unreliable, and I was constantly having to clear my throat. There were patches of white on the vocal folds, as he called them. It turned out that I had thrush, a yeast infection, as a side effect of the asthma inhalant (Advair) that I had been using for years. The inhaler comes with instructions to rinse your mouth after use to prevent thrush, and I had done so religiously, but you cannot gargle as far back as your vocal cords. Dr. Sulica gave me a prescription for an antifungal called Diflucan.
Then he showed me the sulcus: this is what he had been trying to get a better look at when he almost choked me. The sulcus is a furrow or indentation in my left vocal cord that keeps the vocal cords from closing completely, as they must in order to produce the vowel sound “eeeee.” He explained that the sulcus was first identified by a French throat specialist and was thought to exist only in Frenchmen. Then someone found the same condition in a Japanese patient. Finally, the sulcus was seen to occur in people of any nationality. There was no treatment for it, and no known cause. It may have been the result of a cyst that had formed and then collapsed in on itself.
The possible diagnosis of spasmodic dysphonia was the one that seemed to excite Dr. Sulica the most. Dysphonia simply means “hoarseness.” Of course, Dr. Sulica did not need to view my vocal cords through a strobovideolaryngoscope to observe that I was hoarse: he had only to hear me say hello. Two of the hallmarks of the spasmodic dysphoniac are that the voice clears up when the subject laughs and when she sings.
I told him that for as long as I could remember, people had commented on my voice quality. My first-grade teacher asked why I didn’t speak up. The earliest onset of spasmodic dysphonia he’d ever heard of was in adolescence, so this impressed him—maybe I would make medical history. Or maybe my voice was strained for other reasons: I could have muscle-tension dysphonia. Both types produce the same symptoms, but only the muscle-tension variety would be helped with voice therapy.
Three weeks later, I had an appointment with Frizzi-Lillian Ottogebe Linck, who runs the Voice Lab at Weill Cornell Medical Center. At our first meeting, Frizzi typed like mad as I talked. She was German, with long blond hair that she wore pinned up in intricate coils, with hair clips like something a princess or a milkmaid would wear—miniature glints, all in a row. I wanted to ask if she did her own hair: it would be so time-consuming. She was long-waisted, with a swanlike neck, clear skin, and a beautiful face. She wore dangly earrings that she liked to tug on, and elegant, professional-looking clothes, with piquant details: a white blouse with tucks and gathers and drawstrings dangling at the ends of the short sleeves—fussy and simple at the same time.
Her office was full of equipment: two computer monitors, one for her records and schedule, and one for recording vocal utterances and cutting them into phonemes, which she would then translate into visual terms (tones and overtones, areas of hoarseness and clarity). She had charts of the larynx and the pharynx in cross section. She had a watercooler and an electric piano. Her screen saver was a picture of yellow tulips, and her voice had a similar quality, pure and cheerful.
She asked me how much water I drank, and said it was not enough. She quizzed me about my eating habits: seltzer, yes; soda, no; fruit juice, yes—I loved fresh-squeezed orange juice; ice cream, yes, sometimes in quantity just before going to bed. Later I realized that she was trying to rule out acid reflux as a cause of my problem. “You hold your breath,” she observed. I do. There may not be another breath coming.
She asked if there was anything about my voice that I thought she needed to know, and I told her my theory of why I might be the youngest spasmodic dysphoniac on record. I had a brother who, just short of three years old, choked to death at the kitchen table when I was one. I would have just been learning to talk when my mother was inconsolably depressed. I cried a lot, too—especially once my younger brother was born. I believed it was second nature for me to speak around a lump in my throat. “So that’s your default,” Frizzi said, typing it into the record. I also said that I had a deaf grandmother and had to shout to be heard. And, speaking of deafness, I had tinnitus. For years I had heard the hum of a fluorescent light, and one night I realized: Ain’t no fluorescent light. She reached for a tuning fork and struck it against the desk, and we tried to locate what tone my tinnitus rang at.
At the end of the session, she announced that my vocal cords would be going to Club Med, even though I would be staying here. She asked me to cut out seltzer and drink plain water, as the carbonation might be irritating to my throat. We made another appointment for about a month later, when Frizzi would record me in “spontaneous speech.” Meanwhile, I was going to Italy for two weeks, having awarded myself a writer’s residency in Cinque Terre, the beauty spot on the Ligurian Coast where the inhabitants have learned to cultivate grapes and olives and lemons on sheer cliffs overhanging the sea. There are no cars; the towns are linked by train and by well-groomed trails. Although I was a little worried about going hiking with no asthma medicine, it was not a problem.
But I had read the literature on spasmodic dysphonia, so I knew that the term for my condition which neither Dr. Sulica nor Frizzi had used, perhaps so as not to scare me, was “self-strangulation.” I felt tension, tightness, a lump in my throat almost constantly while I was in Cinque Terre. Since I was retrieving memories from childhood while I was there, working on scenes for a memoir, and eating trenette and octopus and drinking the local white wine, I drew the dire conclusion that, instead of getting over a thing like that—having my brother choke at the kitchen table—as I got older I got more obsessed with it. Eating was a choking hazard waiting to happen. Was I, from some misguided envy, trying to emulate my sainted brother? Did I, from guilt, feel I had to limit my consumption of air, to use up only what was strictly necessary to sustain life?
***
On April 26th, rushing up East Sixty-ninth Street, late for my second appointment with Frizzi, I passed an old lady sitting in a wheelchair outside a doorman building. She beckoned to me and said in a high, piping voice, “Could I ask you a favor?” I breezed by, saying “I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry.” But I repented and turned back. I was already late—what difference was two more minutes going to make? “Would you push me up the street?” the lady asked.
There were rose-colored blossoms all along the branches of the trees, and as I pushed her up the street I said, “Look at the beautiful trees.” “Look at all the garbage!” she said. There was a lot of garbage—we had to thread our way between the buildings on our left and the piles of Hefty bags on our right. She asked where I was going, and I said Seventieth and York. She was going to Seventieth and First. “Do you live in Manhattan?” she asked. She used to live in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. I said, “So you come out and depend on the kindness of strangers?” “You got it,” she said. “Sometimes I get celebrities.” She was so cheerful. And she had no problem hearing me, though I was speaking to the back of her head. I guess I expect hearing problems in the elderly, and when I’m talking to someone, I like to see her face.
I wished I had remembered to tell Frizzi, when she took samples of my speech that day, about the woman in the wheelchair with the high, piping voice. Instead, when she had looped a frame over my ears and adjusted a microphone in front of my mouth and started taping me on her computer, I said, “Is this the time to say that I have always hated my voice?” “No,” she said firmly, and turned the recorder off and erased what I had just said so that we could start over. I had always avoided listening to the sound of my own voice. It was worse than looking in a mirror. Frizzi urged me to talk about something else. I would be off to the Azores in a few weeks for a monthlong residency to continue work on my memoir, and so I talked about how the cats were going to be mad at me for leaving again so soon after returning from Italy. Frizzi had a cat, too. She had to keep him out of her bedroom because her fiancé was allergic.
I did not have to listen to my own voice that day. I made a series of six appointments with Frizzi for Tuesday mornings at 9:15, and when I returned we would get to work. I had been hoping she would give me some kind of exercise to do while I was in the Azores, but she knew that it was hard to establish a routine when, by being away, you were already out of your routine. “If I told you to steam your vocal cords twice a day . . . ” (Steam my vocal cords?) I did tell her that ever since the appointment with Dr. Sulica my throat had felt tight, and again she turned away from her equipment and told me just to breathe, Mary-sized breaths, to fill my lungs gently with air and release it.
The lump finally went away while I was in the Azores. All the things that had been bothering me—a twinge here, a foot problem there—evaporated as soon as I stopped being obsessed by them. So then I figured it was galloping hypochondria and I was relieved.
***
On Tuesday, June 10th, Frizzi and I began what she called “a complete course of voice therapy.” In the hallway, even before we sat down in her office, she demonstrated what she wanted me to do: she dropped her mouth open, pushed her tongue loosely between her lips, and let a long sigh out of her nose on a descending note: “Mmmmmmm.” How goofy she looked, this beautiful young woman pulling a gookie, à la Harpo Marx imitating the cigarmaker (except that she didn’t cross her eyes). “Now you,” she said. I wanted to laugh hysterically, but she performed with such conviction, as if she were taking center stage as Brünnhilde, that I suppressed the urge, pushed my tongue out between my lips, as if to deliver a raspberry, and imitated her.
Then she retracted her tongue and produced the same sound with her mouth closed, and I imitated her again.
“What is you favorite color?” Frizzi asked, once we were seated in her office, each with a cup of cool water.
“Green,” I said.
“Mine is yellow,” she volunteered. And she instructed me, when I sighed, to visualize a pure green, with no extra “noise.” I’d taken singing lessons for a while, with someone that Dr. Brodnitz had recommended (an adherent of the school of chewing), so I understood the uses of visualization in the production of sound. My task for the next week was (1) to drink lots of water; (2) to steam my vocal cords twice a day for five to seven minutes; and (3) to do relaxation exercises twice a day.
I was hesitant about steaming at first. Frankly, it sounded like a waste of time, especially during a heat wave, when I was sweating anyway. I had never been one to use a vaporizer, or tent up a towel over a bowl of hot water to help me breathe when I had a cold. I was afraid I’d steam my face off. One morning, when I had a houseguest, I felt so self-conscious about taking time to steam my vocal cords that I managed it furtively while she was in the shower. Later, when I confessed to my new vocal-hygiene regime, my friend was actually quite helpful. She showed me how to lay the towel over the steaming bowl and introduce my face gradually. It was odd to sit silently under the towel while my friend talked: people (most people) need encouragement to keep talking, or they feel funny. Afterward I asked her if my voice sounded any different. “It’s clearer,” she said. That sounded like progress.
Frizzi later explained that the purpose of steaming was to make sure my vocal cords were hydrated (“which I think they are”), eliminating dry pipes as a source of raspiness.
The relaxation exercises were for breathing (as Frizzi noted, I have a tendency to hold my breath) and for placement of the voice. That first week, holding my head high (in imitation of Frizzi) and aiming the sigh up my throat and out my nose, I felt myself a reed. A reed instrument somewhat resembles the throat, reproducing in a primitive way the physiological process of speech or song: directing air through a narrow pipe, varying the force to change the volume, and pinching off the air at intervals to alter the pitch. It was a challenge to keep the reedy sound “green.” I was eager to describe this insight to Frizzi at our next session. She seemed to think it was apt, though I noticed she didn’t write it down.
What did interest Frizzi was pitch. The only way she could get a clear voice out of me was to raise my speaking pitch, and she told me that it is very controversial in her field to change a patient’s pitch. My normal speaking voice is low, far lower than the average female voice. She used her electric piano to show me where she spoke, pressing (without sound) the E above middle C. Did that seem unusually high to me? It did not. Then she showed me the pitch where I habitually spoke: the A below middle C. At home, when I yelled at the cat for knocking a saltshaker off the table, I unrolled the neoprene piano to see what gruff pitch I had been speaking at: I had sunk all the way down to D below middle C, a pitch so low that it is physically impossible to produce clearly unless you are a bass, and I was a soprano. This was also the pitch of the voice in my head, the one that I used to berate myself. (Too bad I hadn’t told Frizzi that day about the lady in the wheelchair, when I would have spontaneously imitated her high, piping voice.)
Every week, Frizzi added to my exercises. I went from sighing to humming: hum-um-um-um-um-um and then changing the vowel (hee-mee-mee-mee-mee-meem, hoo-moo-moo-moo-moom), always employing the “M” to send the sound up past my throat and into my head. The “hum-um-um-um-um” sounded to me like the inarticulate stammer of Ralph Kramden. Then came the “M” followed by various vowels and combinations of vowels.
By now I had moved from the city out to Rockaway for the summer, and before leaving for work in the morning I would heat up a kettle of water and steam my vocal cords, and while my throat was still warm I’d sigh and hum and moan, reassuring myself that my neighbors wouldn’t notice anything unusual about my early-morning vocalizations. They all made so much noise themselves, playing electric guitars and blasting “Riders on the Storm” at two in the morning, that they wouldn’t dare complain. Frizzi told me to practice saying words that began with “M.” I read “M” names out of the Queens phone book, a source of endless fascination. I was taking the ferry from Rockaway to Wall Street, and I found M words on the street on my way to the subway—Metropolitana, Muni Meter, Monday morning—and made up sentences: Marvellous Martin makes marshmallow mousse. My mom makes me mad.
One day I suggested to Frizzi that perhaps I kept my register low in order to reinforce a fantasy I had had as a child that I was meant to be born male. I’d worked this through with a psychotherapist; let’s just say I wanted to be male because boys got to go outside and play while girls got stuck inside doing the dishes.
Frizzi was generally very tolerant of my theories, but at this she expressed skepticism. She said it was a little like saying that looking at the Munich sky had made her eyes blue. Still, Frizzi didn’t know my mother. I had always been told that I had her voice, and I had a horror of turning into her. She talked too much; ergo I was terse. Her voice, high and clear, sailed out of her, at a timbre that even my deaf grandmother could hear—she crowed. I held back and was inaudible.
When I heard my voice on Frizzi’s recordings, I recognized that it was a voice for muttering asides in. I spoke permanently in sotto voce, in an “under voice.” It could be a little bit sexy, but it was a monotone, or at best a duotone: I spoke most of a sentence on one low note, dropping at the end into inaudibility.
When Dr. Sulica asked, at our initial meeting, if I had difficulty speaking on the telephone, I said no, but now I realized that I avoided the telephone. If there was someone I had to call, I put it off and put it off until it was too late at night, and the next morning I put it off again. I was especially frustrated by those voice-recognition protocols (“Press or say one”). The robotic voices would invariably tell me, “You need to speak with a customer representative.” I reverted to pressing the buttons.
After about six sessions, Frizzi said it was time to make an appointment for a follow-up with Dr. Sulica. (I slipped once and called him Dr. Lupica, the name of a New York sportswriter; Frizzi corrected me.) I made the date for Monday, August 4th, and then found out that I didn’t have to come into the city for work that day. I meant to change the appointment, but that entailed a phone call, and I put it off. There had begun to be conflicts: I was late (the 7:45 A.M. ferry didn’t quite get me to the Upper East Side on time); Frizzi accidentally double-booked and tried to reach me to reschedule, but left a message at my Manhattan number. A receptionist started calling to confirm my appointments, but he was calling my Manhattan number. Then the receptionist went on vacation, and if I tried to call Frizzi I got the answering machine of whoever was filling in. All was confusion.
At one session, I rebelled. My neighbors in Rockaway had been playing Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and, listening to that growl, it occurred to me that if Louis Armstrong had submitted to “a complete course of voice therapy” he would not have been—and we would not have had—Louis Armstrong. Why should I clear up my voice so that a stupid machine could understand me?
“To make life less frustrating” was Frizzi’s answer. She was always quick to tell me that if I was satisfied with my voice the way it was, that was fine. And whenever I disparaged my voice, she stopped me: she wouldn’t hear of it.
So I redoubled my efforts. If I was disciplined in nothing else that summer, I would be disciplined about my voice and throat. I started taking the 5:45 A.M. ferry. Frizzi added lip trills to my exercises. Apparently some people have trouble with this, but I recognized it right away as the sound of an exasperated sigh (Pr-r- r-r-r), or, with the voice in it, the Br-r-r-r-r of cartoon characters freezing. Frizzi said this was to stabilize the vocal cords, which was important, because as you get older (she was always very delicate in referring to our age difference) the vocal cords tend to atrophy. I would run up the scale, sustaining the last note until I ran out of breath, and then down the scale. Walking the beach, I would flap my lips and, on one breath, intone a complete chorus of “Happy Birthday to you.”
August approached, and I asked Frizzi if there was anything I could do to prepare for my appointment with Dr. Sulica. “Let’s practice,” she said. I didn’t have to do anything different from what I had been doing with her. For instance, what did I do when I spoke in a clear voice? I straightened up and took a breath, but before I could say anything, she said, “Perfect!” So I never got a chance to tell her that, thanks to all that humming, I had learned to aim my voice up out of my throat and behind my nose to what I had come to think of as my third eye. I wished I had known how to do this when, in my singing group, the sopranos were asked to sustain a drone, and I found it painful.
I asked Frizzi if she had told Dr. Sulica about my theory attributing the strained voice to the brother who had choked. (I had deliberately not divulged this to Dr. Sulica, as I was at pains to impress him with my sanity.) “I told him you had various theories,” she said. Clearly, then, she did not subscribe to any of them. So I asked, “Well, then, what do you think it is?”
She deliberated for a second, and said, “I think it’s the sulcus.”
I had forgotten all about the sulcus—the Frenchmen’s syndrome. The sulcus, or furrow—Frizzi referred to it as a divot, sometimes as “a huge divot”—made it hard for me to close my vocal cords, and to make up for it I used extra force, employing muscles that were never intended for the production of voice, muscles as far away as my buttocks.
***
On the morning of Monday, August 4th, I caught the 5:45 ferry from Rockaway and transferred to the East River ferry, then walked uptown from Thirty-fourth Street to Seventieth and York, maybe for the last time—past the U.N., the fancy fish store, under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, past pastries laid out in shopwindows. I had not changed my appointment with Dr. Sulica. For one thing, Frizzi had arranged to be with me at the follow-up session, and I didn’t know if I could articulate what I felt she had done for me, or replicate it, without her present. And though I didn’t have to be in the city that day, and I always like to squeeze in dental and medical appointments on my way to work—to kill two birds with one stone—this was worth being single-minded about. It was important to be on time and prepared—my voice and throat were important enough, once in my life, to devote an entire Monday morning to, even in summer.
On the walk, I felt that lump in my throat that had come to stay after my initial appointment with Dr. Sulica, and I was afraid tension would undo the weeks and months of steaming and vocalizing. I practiced “M”s in car names, surprised at how many begin with “M”—Mercury, Mazda, Maserati, Mustang. Anyone walking along behind me must have thought I was mad, or planning my lunch, when, passing a deli, I said out loud, “Mortadella. Mustard. Macaroni.” Maybe part of me wanted to have spasmodic dysphonia. Dr. Sulica had been so interested in me. And the symptoms were sort of endearing: I could laugh and I could sing. But if I wanted to yell, or if I was really angry, absolutely nothing came out of me, and it was painful to have all that emotion locked up in there. The men I was involved with often couldn’t make out what I was saying when I spoke with my back to them (when I was doing the dishes, say). I had to turn and speak right into their faces. But maybe it wasn’t me: maybe it was them—maybe they were both deaf.
The appointment with Dr. Sulica was for ten. A white-coated Asian man with a clipboard showed me into an examining room. Frizzi came in to wait with me. Her blond hair was neatly coiled, as usual, and she wore dangly earrings and a gray silk wrap dress, pinned discreetly at the bodice. While we waited, she said, “Let’s review.” Frizzi was very good at thinking aloud, at analyzing things on the spot. Dysphonia is simply hoarseness. The only way Frizzi could get a clear voice out of me was to raise the pitch of my speaking voice. “Remember,” she said, and called out, as if delighted to see someone, “Hallooo! How are youuuuu?” She paused, then added, “Yabba-dabba-doo!” (Frizzi used to watch “The Flintstones” as a child in Munich. It confused her that while all the characters spoke German, the theme song was in English.) I didn’t tell Frizzi that my mother had loved “The Flintstones,” and that she had adopted that expression in particular.
I asked if there was anyone else at Weill Cornell who did her job, and she said no—she is the Voice Lab. Not many people have a master’s in performance as well as in clinical work. (I had noticed the degree from Columbia hanging on her office wall.) I invited her to join my singing group—we could always use a good soprano. “I wish I had time for a chorus,” she said, tactfully. She reminded me again that I could still speak in my old voice, that there was nothing wrong with that.
When Dr. Sulica came in, he had two male students with him, the Asian man and another. Frizzi was expecting a patient, who was late, so she told the receptionist to interrupt her if he arrived while she was with Dr. Sulica. Dr. Sulica shook my hand. I knew he would be evaluating me from the instant I said hello. He elevated the seat of the examining chair and started whipping around the cords attached to the intimidating black box. “This specialty involves a lot of equipment,” I said. “I miss the days of the open flame.” He said you had to have a prodigiously good memory in those days to be able to see if anything had changed. That was true. Then he threaded the tube down my nose.
“Say ‘eeeee’ ”—the position in phonation that brings the vocal folds completely together. It was difficult at first—I felt like I was choking—but even with that wire down my throat, I found my sweet spot: I could hear the pure green sound of it and feel it reverberating, resonating in my forehead, behind my third eye. He had me count from eighty to ninety. Then he asked me to do it again in my old voice, and I tried. But I couldn’t, and why would I want to? Then he announced to his students, the two young men who had come in with him and stood with their arms folded, “The patient presented with a voice that was strangulated—she was using muscles that were never intended for the production of voice—and Frizzi broke that.”
“Yes!” I said. Frizzi was pleased.
“You see how ambiguous it is?” he said to his students, meaning the difference between spasmodic dysphonia and muscle-tension dysphonia, caused by the sulcus deformity. That there was a physiological explanation rather than a psychogenic one for my lifetime of hoarseness was a huge relief. And yet there was a part of me that clung to my theories—not so much the aftermath of a death by choking as the example of a mother whose gift of gab was on a scale that no one of them could possibly imagine. I wanted to say, “You don’t know the half of it.”
Turning back to me, Dr. Sulica laid out the options. “We could bulk up the sulcus,” he said. This would involve an assistant holding the camera while Dr. Sulica injected a fatty substance that would fill up the furrow. It wouldn’t last, though—maybe six months and I’d have to do it again. And there was no known substance to implant in what is known as “Reinke’s space.” Also it was impossible to know ahead of time how it would sound or feel—I might not like the sound.
The camera was still down my throat. “It’s coming out,” he said. “Look up at the ceiling.” And he drew it out. What a relief. Now he asked me what I wanted to do.
“I don’t want an injection,” I said.
He laughed, and said, “O.K., you can start backwards.”
I wish I had said that I was satisfied with what Frizzi had done with therapy, that for my purposes being able to speak clearly on demand was a huge improvement—when I forgot my I.D. and the man in the lobby at work asked my name, I had to say it only once. And, as I was not engaged to sing at the Met on Saturday afternoon, I did not feel the need to pursue aggressive treatment.
He asked if it took more effort to speak the way Frizzi had taught me. “More mental effort but less physical effort,” I said.
“It has to be second nature,” he said. I was afraid that if I did not stay conscious of my voice it would retreat back into my throat. I was also a little worried that I was just imitating Frizzi. “You do sound like her,” he said. But if I had to sound like anyone, it might as well be Frizzi.
At last, Dr. Sulica said, “You won’t need to see me anymore,” adding that it had been a pleasure and that I should feel free to consult him anytime. Over the course of the summer, I had found online a copy of Dr. Brodnitz’s manual for graduate students in laryngology, and I intended to make a gift of it to Dr. Sulica, but I wasn’t able to part with it yet. It contained a hilarious passage describing a procedure to measure a patient’s rate of exhalation by placing an olive up his nose.
“I’m glad I don’t have spasmodic dysphonia,” I said, though it made me feel a little sad that I was no longer of medical interest.
He lowered my chair, and as I sunk he said, “Do you feel let down?”
“Gradually,” I admitted.
“Gently,” he said, refining the joke. From my lower perch, I asked about the thrush, my original complaint, which he seemed to have forgotten. He looked at the image of my larynx on the screen. “Completely gone,” he said. Did I use any inhaler? No. He made a note of that. (My asthma symptoms would catch up with me in November, when the cold weather arrived.)
Just before I got up from the chair, he cautioned me, “Don’t let your friends tell you to revert.”
“Oddly, no one has said a thing,” I told him. In the absence of any remark on my voice quality, I had been left to wonder whether my new voice was just my old voice cleared up, and my friends had been putting up with it for years and were grateful, or whether I was deluding myself that there’d been any change at all.
Frizzi’s patient hadn’t shown up, so we had one last session. She confessed that she had been very nervous: “I don’t know if you noticed, but I had cold clammy palms when I shook hands with Dr. Sulica.” Often patients can’t reproduce what they’ve done with her once they’re in the examining chair—eighty per cent of her patients do not succeed—so she was immensely relieved and proud. She even claimed that, on the video, the sulcus looked better. We played around with her computer, listening to my old voice, comparing it with my new one. She cocked her head and said thoughtfully, as if it were something truly worth pondering, “Only Dr. Sulica and I have heard your old voice.” And only with Frizzi and Dr. Sulica could I share the feeling of accomplishment that came with having a new voice.
Frizzi showed me to the checkout desk. I felt a little emotional on saying goodbye—how I would have loved to be friends with this woman. She was off to the beach for four days, my beach, Rockaway, but we were not destined to run into each other. The woman at the checkout desk said, “Dr. Sulica isn’t charging you today.” Perhaps this was standard procedure for a follow-up exam, or perhaps it was a courtesy for having been used as a teaching exhibit. Still, I felt as if I had graduated. Summa cum laude.
Yabba-dabba-doo!
Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and was a query proofreader at the magazine for twenty-four years. She has written for Talk of the Town and for newyorker.com, and she is the author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (2015) and Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (2019).
