Hey guys, so I had my follow-up exam today and got to finally see the vocal folds again. They look fantastic, the suture was clean and the healing had really progressed nicely! I'm so happy I didn't mess them up this last week. I also got the Botox injection done. It was a really, really small needle that they poke you in the neck twice with and inject it. It didn't really hurt, maybe a little prick. It did leave two little marks for a couple hours though. I think they're already gone by now though.
Interestingly, Dr. Kim said I could start saying a few words a day starting today, so I don't have to wait another week. That's actually easier said than done though. I tried to say a couple words and literally nothing came out! It's so hard to get any sound to actually come out (and this was before the Botox). It'll likely be even harder now with the Botox, at least for a little bit. I'm probably going to just still wait another week or so to really start trying to get sound out so I don't risk trying too hard and damaging something.
Here are my tests results:
The first one contains the "low" voice results, with a mean frequency of 155Hz. You can see above and to the left of that he wrote 229Hz, which is where he says I should end up once it's fully healed. Right in the middle of the female range! The second one is the "high" voice results, where I was trying to use a feminine voice. I ended up using my high feminine voice since I was a little confused what they were telling me to do. I thought they had said to use the
highest pitch I could do, so I started out trying to belt out something at probably like 350Hz, lol. I started laughing though so they started over and I just did it in my high female voice, which is what you see there. It's really cool though how their measurements match almost exactly what I had measured myself in Praat with my three different voices. My low measurement was 153Hz, theirs was 155Hz. My high measurement was 190Hz, theirs was 196Hz. Neat.
The other two are just some other measurements they took. The third one contains the phonation results where you can see how much air pressure I needed compared to normal: 2.77 vs a normal of 1.5-2, so I was using almost twice the amount of air pressure I should. Also, my phonation time was 13 seconds compared to a normal of 20-25 seconds, so really short there. I'm not entirely sure what the fourth chart means, but I think that's where he determined that I have a vocal tremor. I don't think it was good either. As you can see the graph goes way outside the bounds of the inner circle, haha.
IMPORTANT: Oh yeah! An interesting thing Jessie told me was to make sure that when I started to talk after the 1 month mark that I should
intentionally try to use a higher pitch, as opposed to just trying to speak fully relaxed. The reason is so that I can train myself to work with the new shortened vocal folds and a higher pitch that I won't be used to. She also said that as the Botox wears off in a few months that I might notice that my pitch wants to go down a little lower due to me now having more control over them and not being used to it, meaning it will want to level out lower and be monotone until I train myself to use my full range again. I was thinking back to what voodle was saying about how her voice started to go back down after a few months and that may be the reason why. Voodle, if you're reading this I would say to continue to intentionally speak in a higher frequency for a while to train yourself and it should open up your range and ability as you progress and it'll become more natural and consistent speaking at a higher pitch and across a wider range.
So there you have it. I'm finally done with the first step: getting through the first week. Now I get to look forward to starting to get my voice back and hearing it for the first time, yay! I'll keep you guys updated as I start to get phonation again and I'll post audio and/or video recordings with my progression. I'm so excited to move into the second week of recovery and that much closer to hearing my new voice!
