A Voice Apart

This Holiday season, we wish you the best of voice and the best of health and prosperity for this upcoming New Year, and always! For the last 42 years, I have worked on a lot of voices; fixing them, restoring them, or just turning amateur speakers and singers into professionals . I have noticed that, o ver the last decade, the attitude of all of those people who were seeking my services ha s vastly changed. Before 2005, people in general were happy-go-lucky, so to speak. They were gladly making commitments to work on their voices (to whichever degree it was needed), gladly kept their appointments and happily paid for our professional services . Needless to say that, in the past, the music scene in Toronto was pretty much thriving and was attracting a lot of wannabe singers. There were a lot of bands formed at H igh Sch ools and even M iddle S chools, let alone Universities. Those guys and girls had a goal in mind; they wanted to become well-known singers/perform

The voice disorder such as a paralyzed vocal cord is definitely “not a picnic” to put it mildly. Usually, this condition occurs due to a related or non-related surgery. It occurs very often during the thyroid extraction or spine fusion, where the neck is involved. It actually could occur in any surgery where intubation takes place. The fact is that majority of the hospitals here in Canada and in the United States are the teaching hospitals. What that means is that these kind of procedures are not necessarily conducted by the appointed specialist(s), but are being performed by medical interns or even by medical faculty University students. Those young doctors to be are obviously still learning and do not have experience how to insert those tubes correctly. Thus, the occurred mistakes, which could cause the patient a severe damage of their vocal box, could be crucial to one’s life.   So the patient who went in to the operating room with a perfectly good voice, woke up a few ho