This morning I saw Dr. Natasha Mirza, as recommended by my primary care physician, about my weak voice and what could be done to make it stronger. I had fears that I had a vocal paralysis issue or worse as my voice starts sounding strained over the course of the day. Her nurse applied a numbing spray in my nasal passages. I waited several minutes and then she (Dr. Mirza) ran a long scope through my nasal passage all the way down to where my vocal cords were. If any of you have ever had a nasal scope done, it is a fascinating thing. You can see everything. I sang the note E several times and Dr. Mirza, her nurse, a Penn Med intern, and I all looked at the monitor screen together. Dr. Mirza said that Dr. Haben's work looks fine. My cords were definitely not paralyzed. She said that she could laser some of the webbing off to increase the volume/power of my voice, but at a slight cost of pitch. "It's a tradeoff," she said. "Do you want more power or higher pitch?" She said that with vocal therapy I could learn techniques to increase my power a little, so I decided to give that a try. "If you are still not satisfied with any volume gains through vocal therapy, then we can try the surgery option," she said.
So, from all this, I concluded:
* I'm glad Dr. Haben's surgery was successful, especially after my first surgery with him failed.
* From what I could deduce, Dr. Mirza could've done this very same surgery here in Philadelphia. She's been doing it for quite some time, so I really didn't have to travel all the way to Rochester (5.5 hours each way) to get this done. I'm sad about that, but it likely would've cost more here since we're talking about a hospital in downtown Philadelphia with expensive hospital fees. This procedure would've been considered cosmetic according to my insurance, so I would've had to pay it out of pocket at Penn Med anyway.
* I'm sad and glad that I don't have vocal tremor. I didn't relish the idea of being scoped and having Botox injections in my cords for the rest of my life.
* I'm sad about the volume, but given the tradeoff, I'd rather keep my pitch as-is. "It's at 205 right now, which is within the female range," she said.
* I'm glad about the voice therapy. I should've been doing some of this anyway instead of trying to train myself. I lost my ability to sing (my range is very limited now) so maybe (cross fingers) I can regain some of that through therapy.
