The first time I realized I could do theatre was when I was 8 years old. When my mom told me about an audition, my response was: “Wait, but is it on an actual stage? Like will people pay to come see me?” And then there was no turning back. I was constantly looking for shows to be in and classes to take.

The turning point for my voice could have been when I did The Miracle Worker, which was a co-production with Torch Theatre and the History Theatre. I played Helen Keller, which meant that instead of speaking for a whole show, I was constantly screaming, grunting, and shrieking, and making noises that aren’t normally called for in a theatre. I don’t remember my throat hurting at all during that show, which is why I say that was the beginning of my vocal issues. Right after that I did Ramona Quimby at the Children’s Theatre Company, where I played Ramona. Luckily it wasn’t a musical, but the problem was that we didn’t have microphones. It was on the main stage, which is very, very big, and we had over 70 performances. Every day I had to go onstage and be Ramona, who is a very loud kid. Towards the end of the run I remember I completely lost my voice, but I was told I had to go onstage anyway and they just gave me a microphone. After that I played Annie, and then did continuous shows almost without any breaks About a year after Ramona, Annie, and Miracle Worker, when I was in 7th grade, I started complaining more about my voice. My voice teacher at the time told me I should go to see an ear, nose, and throat specialist because she thought there might be something wrong. I went to see someone, and they told me I should just take care of my voice, it’s probably just sore from overuse. So I was a little more careful, but I didn’t think anything could really happen. I continued doing shows, and didn’t sing as much. Then, towards the end of 8th grade my voice was starting to really, really hurt. I was constantly complaining about the pain and finally my parents took me to another ENT. This time they decided to do an endoscopy. That means that they took a little metal tube that had a camera attached to the end and they put it in my mouth and down my throat to look at my vocal cords. First, they spray an awful numbing liquid all over the back of your mouth so you don’t gag, then you hold your tongue out with gauze while they put the camera back. The really cool thing about this was that you could just look at a screen and see your vocal cords. They have you sing different tones and you can see as your voice gets higher, the vocal cords move back and forth very quickly and tightly, and when you sing lower pitches, they move slowly in fluid motions. With that first scope we found out that I had nodules on my vocal cords. Luckily, they were just in the beginning stages.

Vocal cord nodules are pretty common in performers. They are caused by overuse or damage to the vocal cords. And the interesting thing is, it’s not the bumps that are causing the discomfort in your voice. Most of the time when someone has a sore throat, it’s because the muscles are sore from overuse. As people strain to make sound come out, little bumps are formed on the cords. These are nodules. And the more you use your voice once they’re there, the harder and more calloused they will become.

Once it was established that this is what I had, they referred me to a doctor at the Lions Voice Clinic. I was told to stop putting pressure on my voice for quite a while, so I stopped singing and I began speaking less. A couple weeks later, I started meeting with the doctor we were referred to. She told me that the constant strain on my voice had been too much, and in order to make my nodules go away, I had to rest my voice. I was instructed to not do any shows all summer, and I was to speak in a “special” voice. The trick was to keep it in your upper register and try to not feel anything when you spoke. Most people I spoke to just associated this with speaking in a high voice, but there was more to it than that. Pressure can be put on your voice when you experience hard glottal attack, which is impact that’s made by pushing words out of your mouth rather than letting them come out easily. So all summer I was extremely careful with my voice, trying to maintain a healthy pitch and avoid hard glottal attack. I didn’t scream, sing, or do anything that was too strenuous on my voice. It was really, really difficult, but I didn’t want to wreck my voice and my career forever.

Towards the end of the summer I went back to the ENT for one of my monthly endoscopes. The good news was the nodes were almost gone. They told me that by the time I was back in school, I wouldn’t have to be as cautious and they should have completely disappeared by then. However, at that point they saw a small hemorrhage. It had been almost hidden by the nodes before, and they said it could have been there for years. It wasn’t a big deal. A blood vessel must have popped when there was so much strain on my voice, and it left this hemorrhage. It should have been harmless, so that’s how we regarded it. I continued resting for the last month of summer, and started high school at SPCPA. After a couple weeks of school there, I went in for another check-up. This time the good news was that the nodes were gone! All of my hard work and restraint over the summer had paid off. But now of course, there was another problem. The hemorrhage that had seemed insignificant-that we were going to ‘keep an eye on,’had formed a problem. My body had reacted to it being there, and formed a small bump over it. Inside that bump was just liquid and stuff from my vocal cords. It was protecting the part of my cord that had the hemorrhage on it. Well, this wasn’t good news.

The doctors referred to the bump as a lesion.That’s not what it was specifically classified as, because it could also be known as a polyp or cyst depending on whom you ask. We’ll go with lesion for simplicities sake. So now we had another bump on my vocal cords, this time caused by something that could have been inconsequential. This was more serious than the nodules though, because often times lesions didn’t go away with just vocal rest. The majority of the people who had lesions ended up getting surgery. When my doctor told us this, she went over how the surgery would happen if we chose to go that way. The whole procedure and recovery process would be as follows:

I would be put to sleep, and then they would go in with long tools (they would watch with microscopes from up above) and simply scrape away the lesion. Though that seems fairly simple, after that the lengths I’d have to go to to protect my voice were extreme. If I so much as coughed, sneezed, laughed, or spoke up to a week after the surgery, I could permanently scar my vocal cords. After that it would entail weeks and weeks of slowly building up the ability to speak again without damaging myself. My cords would be extremely sensitive. And the thing is, we don’t even know if the surgery would work. Many things could go wrong, and most surgeons refuse to do an operation like that on a child.

My options were to either try to surgery, or spend a very long time on vocal rest in hopes that it would go away. We had a meeting with a surgeon and my doctor, and decided that because surgery was so risky, I needed to go on vocal rest for a month.

It has now been 3 and a half weeks, and I haven’t been in school since a week after my meeting with the surgeon and doctor. I’m allowed one sentence every 15 minutes, because complete silence might make my muscles decondition. I go back to school in 5 days. Even though I’ll finally be free to speak, I’ll have to still be careful until my next ENT appointment which is the Friday of my first week back. Everyone is hoping that the lesion will be gone and I can go on with my life. If not, and I have to get surgery.. well, that’ll be another story.