Well, poo.

Sooooo.

Turns out that my trach shave likely screwed my vocal cords. Well, one of them. They can’t be sure. But the timing is suspicious (my voice was okay -> surgery -> voice not okay). And it’s a risk with surgery in that area – the ligaments and such can just get a bit looser afterwards and maaaaybe that’s what happened.

Thing is, my speaking voice is fine. It’s singing that’s a bit fucked.

Basically I lost my falsetto and my passagio got patchy, and over the last month or so I’ve started to notice that my voice is a bit tired at the end of a lot of talking. Not bad bad. But it feels a bit like it used to at the end of a conference day.

Anyway, so today I had a camera down my throat. They gave me the option of local anaesthetic, but for singers it’s better if you can cope without. So I did my best to cope without. I managed to get right to the end, then something they did made me cough multiple times (which is super fun with a camera right near your vocal cords, lemmie tell you).

Aaaand….they managed to capture in their high-speed imaging that one of my vocal cords is not managing to get fully taut. That means that they don’t meet properly, which is why my high pitches are fucked.

Apparently this is something they’ve seen before, but dealing with it is tricky. On the plus side, it is just one side that’s iffy.

So, next week we’re going to try a temporary fix (lasts 2-4 months) which, excitingly, either might fix it, might do nothing, or might drop the pitch of my voice (yaaaaaaay).

That’s next week. If that works, then we’ll do a rinse-and-repeat with a permanent solution (which is a fat graft).

If that doesn’t work then we’re into the land of marked Here be dragons on the map. They might try and shorten that vocal cord just a smidge, so that it can mate up properly with its friend.

And if that doesn’t work then we’re into actual pitch-type surgery, if I want to get any of the high-pitches back reliably. But that will permanently change my voice, reduces range (although I currently don’t reliably have my passagio and my falsetto is completely gone most of the time). Oh, and it also loses me the lower pitches.

So that…is not optimal.

Anyhow, so fun-fun-fun is that next week I get to have someone stab a vocal cord while I’m awake. Yaaaaaaay.