In my last post Saturday, I briefly mentioned that I was having some breaks in my voice, similar to a teenage boy going through puberty. I was hoping this was the start of my “good voice” trying to break through. Interestingly, I went to a bar late Saturday night and had difficulty talking above the bar noise – as you could hear in my voice sample earlier that day, it was tough to speak loudly enough to be heard. However outside in the parking lot afterwards, without the background noise of the bar, I suddenly was able to string together multiple normal-sounding sentences.

Then Sunday (yesterday), my good voice stuck around for much of the day. In fact, I had my good voice for most of the the morning and early afternoon! I was able to sing (softly) at church, I still couldn’t hit the higher notes and I still couldn’t sing at a normal singing volume but it was nice to have SOME range. And, of course, it was nice to be able to talk again.

Partway through the day, about mid-afternoon, my voice returned to a whisper, similar to my last voice sample. This lasted for several hours, with occasional bursts of normal-sounding voice. Then in the evening, my normal voice came back again. Overall, I would say I had a good, normal voice for about 75% of the day.

I still do not have much power behind my voice, but I noticed I was able to raise my voice a little when calling my wife from the other room. Another observation I made yesterday: when I was in a noisy environment, my whispery/bad voice came back – even if I was in the middle of a good voice period. I think it had something to do with me trying to talk louder to compensate for the noisy environment. It’s something I will have to keep monitoring – I’m hoping that my voice continues to “fill out” and get back to the good ol’ days when I could project, raise my voice if needed, and even yell.

Update: 10:00 pm – Here is a voice sample from this evening:

I started off this morning with a slightly better voice, which I attributed to my normal “morning voice” along with the fact that I have a little bit of a cold. This makes my voice go into a different vocal range than normal and I’ve had this happen before, where it temporarily masks the underlying spasmodic dysphonia.

Here’s my voice sample from the morning:

As you can hear, not too bad. What I didn’t know was that the Botox was either just starting to kick in, or about to kick in because by about 11:00 this morning, I noticed that my voice was changing. It went from being “spasmodic” to just being “raspy” or “weak”. It took me a few hours to believe that the spasms were gone, because I’ve had stretches where my voice smooths out and I have what I call my “breakthroughs” where my voice sounds pretty decent. But inevitably, these breakthroughs only last several minutes, not several hours. So as I went through my day and started receiving positive feedback from my co-workers, I didn’t want to jinx it by saying the Botox was working.

Lo and behold, as the day went on, I continued to experience the same voice, without the spasms. I must say it was a very good feeling, even though my voice is not back 100%, just to be able to speak with no breaks or “strangled” sound to my voice. I was able to use the phone, I was able to have lengthy conversations with my co-workers, and basically I came out of my shell a bit today.

Here is a voice sample from the evening, where you can hear the raspy, weaker voice I talked about:

This is a pretty stark contrast from my morning voice and just listening to the two recordings back-to-back is interesting. I don’t know how long the weaker voice will last, my doctor said it can be anywhere from a couple days to a week, or even up to several weeks, everybody responds differently to the different dosages. I never thought I would be happy to have a voice that sounds like it does in the previous sample. By normal standards, it sounds like I have a cold and I should be in bed. But after suffering from spasmodic dysphonia, it feels great to have a voice again. I’ll continue to hope and pray that it improves over the coming days, weeks, and months.