I lost my voice. It’s day six. This has never happened to me before.
I am not noticing any signs of becoming like Roger Ebert, whose forced silence has turned him into a modern day Lao Tzu. I’m mainly just frustrated. I silently attended a two-night wedding in Chicago, full of family I hadn’t seen in years, completely unable to speak with loved ones. Chicago is less fun as a mute, I tell ya.
Ways I’ve worked around this: Using Skype to webcam myself into group meetings or interviews (so at least I can respond with facial expressions) and typing my questions in while someone else reads them aloud. Conducting a lot of conversations with gchat. Whispering as loudly as possible.
Yesterday, after hearing me whisper all day at work, Friend Danny said that the whispering could actually be making my problem worse and slowing my recovery. So he taught me how to use the the Say command in my MacBook terminal to get the computer to speak for me. Turns out, you can change the program’s voices, so today I attended meetings as “Victoria.”
Friend Dan recommended using this method:
