Things have been careening in my brain to be a little out of control—there’s a definitive need for me to get it down once and then go back and filter and edit later. This is my project to be done before school starts in January. I think it will probably be the most therapeutic thing for me to see down on paper and might help me with some mini crisis I seem to endure on a yearly basis. My friend encouraged me to peel back the layers of the onion…and I suppose I am a many-layered stinky fruit or vegetable of sorts. I look pretty on the outside, well, most of it but there are many things festering below the surface which need elaboration.

I was sleeping in my bed last night and I was alone in the house. Miss L had slipped out to go sleep at home instead of my couch which is an anomaly of sorts–she is my weighted rock who seems to be the only person around aside from a pretty aggressive ex boyfriend who likes to call me at least 4 times a day to make sure I haven’t killed myself. Not literally, but the impression lingers. So I decided to record a voice mail message, or rather a greeting. I am not sure why I felt the need to do that then, but I was fiddling with the phone and started flipping through the greetings that already existed. Number one was where I landed first of course…and as I listened, it occurred to me that the greeting was perhaps the last evidence of my old voice not screaming “I hate you motherfucker” or moaning in my lame song. And I kept listening to it over and over and over again. And after sending the ex off to go listen to it while I was in the subway, we confirmed that it is indeed the last evidence of that. Then I decided that this was the point in my life when things started dipping downhill. Yeah, it’s uh, just a voice, right. But in all honesty? Losing my voice didn’t do much except mess with my ego and give certain fools I seem to see when I am out around jersey city an opportunity to make fun of me. Not having a loud audible voice has somehow given people the impression that I am say, deaf. So they will greet me in social situations with a whisper, laughing to themselves. I think I am going to learn how to beat down ass. Because it would be so incredibly SATISFYING to punch the next fool in the throat and then see how much they like to make fun of me for something so obviously out of my control.

So the voice loss. I guess that is the story that I decided to set out to tell. I keep listening to my greeting over and over again like a psycho. I don’t know what I get from that except some weird assuaging of self.

In any case, back in 2006 I had started a new job with my current place of employment. It wasn’t a job I chose because I thought working in a call center was a dreamy place to be. It was a job I chose out of necessity–they offered health insurance, and that is the only prerequisite I wanted, or needed for that matter. It didn’t challenge my morality like working at the gym did–lying to people about the gym being the one thing that would change their lives or make their partners love them again. That and the idea that the company made you wait 9 months to get health insurance because they didn’t want to pay for anyone to have babies on their dime. (again, stories for another chapter)

So I had been working all of 3 months and 17 days–I had been bartending as well because the $12 an hour super salary wasn’t cutting the mustard at all. Lifting beer cases was something they had always told me not to do, but I am stubborn sometimes and stupid, and so I was lifting not only cases of beer but kegs at this Brooklyn hole. It was cold, December in fact, and I was feeling a little weak due to the scar stretching. So feeling the dull tear wasn’t something totally obvious at first. I was eating Brunch the next morning in the city when that familiar ripping pulling sensation started pulsating in my chest. I looked up at Eddie at the time and told him we needed to go. NOW. To the hospital. We took a cab up there and I walked into the ER.

The ER had become like a second home to me, at least in hospitals I have spent a good amount of time in. They did their tests and saw the tear, again. This time was a subclavian arterial tear which lay very next to the vertebral artery, which was the main artery to the brain. It was on my left side, and because of what they saw there, they ended up looking and saw small blisters on these arteries also on my right side. Due to the proximity and connectivity and the general risks that are associated with all of my surgeries, they ended up deciding to repair the arch then as well. So those 17 days of being eligible for health insurance ended up being the start of a small leave of absence for me. The surgeries got pushed to February and were planned in three parts. On the left, on the right, and then the center.

Surgeries at this point in my life are just common fodder. I am not scared of the surgeries per say, and I don’t think about dying too much until after the fact. It is the quality of life one becomes fixated on–at that point I had at least one stroke I had not remembered having. Strokes became the dark cloud hovering over me and to this day are my most common fear. There are several people who know they need to put the damn pillow down on my face if it ever goes there…So it was fairly routine, number one and number two, and the tricks didn’t seem to happen until the third, and most dangerous, which was the arch.

The stroke that knocked me into a dark grey place came after a seizure post op. According to the nurses I started seizing and then sat there with my eyes clouded over, pupils fixed tight. When they looked into my eyes they saw nothing, and thought there might be some possibility I had major brain damage which might have thrown me into a permanent vegetative state. I stayed staring upwards, into nothing for several hours. I had a healer working on me at the time—from afar. I had called him and begged him to keep watch over me because I was concerned I wouldn’t make it out alive, again–these were surgeries 5,6,7…a girl’s luck has to run out eventually right?

After he stopped working on me, almost to the minute I woke up…to the concern of my audience…my parents and friends and boyfriend at the time. I couldn’t speak, my voice was gone. It was then that we realized the laryngial nerve which was wrapped around the arch was in some way nicked or damaged and it was not coming back. The vocal folds hit each other several times a second and mine were not hitting at all. And they stayed like that for another year and a half until I met the magic man who came up with a solution.

Dr. W came recommended from my cardiologist and also from a friend who is still a pretty well known singer. He had developed a technique which involved taking skin cells from cadavers, removing the DNA, and injecting it into the vocal folds, effectively plumping them up. The doctors called it zombie dust…a term I quickly adopted for myself because it was just that awesome. We had already gone through the easy solutions, electroshock therapy to the folds which involved electrodes strapped to the neck, squeezing them tight in intervals of 30 seconds for a half an hour.

The surgery seemed routine enough. I hadn’t had a voice for so long–nobody could hear me at all really. I became a note writer when I was in a store. I couldn’t bartend anymore, I couldn’t go out anymore because nobody could hear me. I effectively had my voice silenced completely. When I woke up it felt like my throat had been raped by a dry rope. Nothing could compare to the horrendous nature of that sore throat…strep was a joke in comparison.

After a few weeks it started coming back, albeit slowly. Today, close to two years later, it’s still not what it was. Jerks still make fun of it. I still am too shy to go out too much in any kind of loud place. I haven’t put anything in its place. It is just a source of shyness and humiliation for me. Someday I will make everyone eat the shit they shoveled on me–or maybe karmic relief will find its way into my corner and I will end up the winner anyways. For now, though, I’ll just keep going through my saved greetings to remember…