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.

Well my last post had me a bit frustrated with one of my worst days in a long time…and over the past couple days, my voice stayed in a “bad” range. If I had to grade my voice on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say my voice was a 2 for the last few days. Today, for most of the day it was back up a couple notches to a 4 or 5. I was able to have a couple lengthy (multiple minute) conversations today where my voice actually held up. In fact, a couple times my throat muscles loosened up after several minutes of talking, and I was able to speak multiple sentences in a near-normal voice. (more like a 8 out of 10)

This is as close as I’ve come to what I call my “breakthrough” week I posted about earlier. During that week, I had a few moments of darn-near normal voice (one of which I recorded). Today, I didn’t have it THAT good but I definitely felt good. It’s now nearly 11:00 at night and I don’t feel the normal muscle fatigue I feel at the end of each day. I don’t know of anything different I’ve done, I didn’t get any more sleep than normal…I did go on a “date” with my wife last night and we saw a late movie, I didn’t get to bed until late but I still slept 8 hours so I don’t think that factored into it. Last night while out on our date, my voice was pretty terrible and my wife even told me not to talk as she could hear me struggling. (good thing we went to a movie, huh?)

Then, suddenly, without warning, my voice dramatically improved today. It’s a head-scratcher, but I’ll take it. I think I made 5 phone calls at work today that were at least 5-10 minutes each. I know I can’t do that on most days, because my phone voice is typically worse than my normal speaking voice. Again, I don’t know why. It does seem like it snowballed a little bit, I had a little success in the morning, then more in the afternoon (when I normally don’t have a good voice)…then it kept on rolling all day.

Botox update

I did officially get clearance from my health insurer for my appointment Monday. So my appointment is scheduled and I will be having my very first Botox injection done. I will have updates here on my blog (I’m thinking of doing a slightly different type of blog post that day…more of a running blog to describe my emotions/experiences throughout this much-anticipated day).

I have a good idea what to expect regarding the procedure itself…what I don’t know is how well it will work. Everybody responds differently and there is typically a period of trial and error until the doctor figures out the right dosage. So I don’t expect this to be perfect but even a little bit of progress will be wonderful. I have a 20-year class reunion coming up in July so I’d obviously like to have a normal voice for that. Some of these people haven’t seen me in 20 years and I don’t want their first impression to be like I sound now. That means I have a little bit of anxiety about this Botox injection…knowing that the typical person lasts 3 months, that puts me right there at my reunion. And knowing that the first one is a big unknown, it’s really hard to know what will happen. There’s probably not enough time to have another shot done before then so I’ll just have to hope it holds on long enough (provided it works).