How Scott Adams Got His Groove Back

I like talking.

No. I LOVE to talk.

When I was younger, I was usually very quiet. People couldn't hear me when I spoke. I was pathologically shy.

I wanted to speak louder so people could hear me, at least. I did this by learning how to proJECT that voice. Yup. Now I can throw that sucker two blocks away.

As a young adult, married, I rarely spoke at all. Very serious first-husband issues. HE did the talking.

Several years after the divorce, recovering from the Silence, I started to talk again. To tell my actual own opinions and stuff. I went to college, and since I like to ask questions in class, that helped.

My work, later, involved many hours each day on the telephone. Researching, interviewing, negotiating, what have you. I LOVE to talk on the phone. I'm extremely good at it, and I know it. And I have a very good *telephone voice.* It's quite deep for a woman, and somehow, it's often easier for people to take that over the phone than in person. Go figger.

Since I started to lose my hearing, first from allergies and then from this disseminated HSV (cold sore) germ that got into my auditory nerve, I can't hear myself right any more.

So, like a lot of the hearing-impaired, I often talk too loud now. I'm working hard on stopping that; I really don't like it a bit, don't want to do it.

The thing is, though...

I also tend to lose my voice.

From the extreme allergies came a condition that goes under some different names. On my printout of my medical history and such that I carry around, I just call it *vocal cord dysfunction,* per the first diagnosing doc. *Spasmodic Dysphonia* is one of its more formal names.

My vocal cords twitch open and shut when they aren't supposed to. An allergist, in 1993, saw it with a scope. She was spraying different allergenic stuff around, cleaning chemicals and things, to see if I was a *twitcher* in response to an allergen.

Yup.

I'm very lucky, because with me it's intermittent. When the allergies aren't bad, my voice may be fine. In general, all things considered, I can live with it. It's not great, but hey. I usually have worse things going on.

When it isn't fine, I know a secret formula that restores its function for around 4 hours at a time. It was passed to me by a friend in Shreveport, who swore he got it from an old black lady bartender down in New Orleans. And it works so very well, I passed the formula to a professional singer in Shreveport, and an actor in San Francisco, each of whom burst into tears when they tried it out and realized they could get themselves talking and singing again.

heh! Proud of that one, I am.

So...on the very worst days, I squeak like someone with laryngitis. On others, I sort of crunch, or lose words. Or just go all whiskey-voice. Often it bounces around between all those types in one sentence, so people look at me strange. The lizards, for some reason, love it.

I don't want to make little the impact it has on one's life. To lose your ability to speak even in part messes up your whole sense of identity, of self, of who you are and how you relate to everyone around you. You can see in the faces of others that they don't respond to you anything at all like they used to do. You are diminished.

Scott Adams, the author of the wonderful comic strip Dilbert, has exactly the same thing. From exactly the same instigator: allergies.

Unlike me, he's been unable to talk for 18 months.

Well, folks - he just got his voice back.

He literally retrained his brain to make the neural connection work again.

I am so happy for that guy, I just cannot stand it.

I learned this through, of all things, the Friday Ark over at the Modulator. Someone put my moth pix in the Invertebrates, how very nice! I clicked around.

A blogger who likes science had a beautiful cat pic entered. I checked out that blog. The neuroscience behind Scott Adams getting his voice back was discussed, and the Dilbert blog linked.

What a fabulous turn of events.