Hi all,
I'm one step further down my VFS journey: today I had my appointment at the phoniatric department of Charité in Berlin that served two purposes: one, to ascertain that everything's well with my voice before I take the plunge and go to Yeson, and second of all, to find out about the glottoplasty procedure Charité is offering (Profs. Gross and Nawka).
For diagnostics, I had to do the usual thing: read a few test sentences in masculine and feminine mode, loud and soft arpeggios up and down to find out my range, hold a midrange note, and a laryngoscopy during which I was supposed to make sounds. Turns out my vocal production is entirely healthy, cord closure is fine across the whole 3 1/3 octave range.
In the following discussion, both Prof. Nawka and Dr. Kramer were very nice and knowledgeable. We talked about the various methods of conservative therapy, as offered by Thomas Lascheit in Berlin and Stephanie Kruse in Munich (the best in Germany). I explained that I'm in contact with them and regularly swapped opinions, so was quite up on the developments in conservative therapy.
As far as surgery goes, Prof. Nawka resolutely opined that the VFS he performs wasn't for me, since my voice functions quite well, compared to the average transwoman. He said that after surgery I would definitely wind up with a voice quality worse than what I have now, with hoarseness a frequent problem, with curtailed low-end response, but, on the average, no gain up top. And he mentioned that it could easily render the voice unsuitable for singing.
To illustrate the point, their assistant played me before-and-after samples (they're not available on the Net because German data protection laws prohibit it), and I must say they confirmed my resolve not to have the surgery in Berlin. Sure, the heavy bass response is gone, but the resulting voices are too small and weak, sometimes hoarse. And to my ears, they still sound decidedly masculine.
I then brought up the surgery performed at Yeson, and Dr. Kramer replied she was aware that excellent work was being done in that regard in Korea. I then mentioned that I had spoken to a number of Dr. Kim's patients on the phone, and that I was very impressed with their results, esp. their good, clear voice quality without hoarseness or rasp. When I mentioned that some of these patients had reported about half an octave of range gain up top, she was quite astonished. It seemed like we all found something to take home from that conversation, and parted ways.
Bottom line: Charité is no true alternative to Yeson, not in the slightest. Despite the similar approach upon cursory inspection, the Yeson results are consistently better. Berlin may be an option for people enrolled in the German health system who cannot afford Yeson, suffer from a really bad voice, and have no singing ambitions. All others are probably better advised to keep saving their pennies for the trip to Seoul.
Regards,
Amy
