elisem | the voice lessons continue to have good results

So to tell you about today's happiness I need to start back in 2006.

In 2006, my health crashed. In particular, a really distressing medical condition took my voice away for some weeks, and then I had about a year of vocal therapy to regain the ability to speak and sing (a little) again.

I used to sing a lot. All the time, if I could. When I was a little kid, according to my mother she knew that I was awake because the singing started which meant the little bird was awake.

Losing my voice was really hard and traumatic, even on top of the other hard and traumatic things going on. I lost my voice around three weeks after my partner Mike died. His memorial service here was a month after his death, and I could not speak a word at it, nor sing with people at the what-became-a-wake afterwards. (More than my voice got lost, too; my body crashed in ways that I'm still dealing with.)

Working with the voice therapists was helpful. After about a year, I could speak just fine. I could sing five notes.

Five notes is not an awful lot of range for somebody who was a bird as a child.

I started taking voice lessons in 2020 because I wanted to increase my breathing capacity so as to increase my odds of surviving COVID if I caught it. Previously, I had about 2/3 of what my care team would like me to have as a baseline. It was called "diminished lung capacity." Singing involves breathing, learning to breath better and more effectively and all that, and that might help my lungs, I reasoned. And it did. After a while, I had improved my lung capacity enough that I hit "what they wanted me to have" a significant portion of the time. This was great.

I had more notes I could sing, too. Which was also great.

My vocal cords had a lot of atrophy to deal with. That's not always easy work, especially for a person in their sixties.

Today in my voice lesson I had more than five notes to play with. Today I have thirty-six notes to play with. What I don't have is words to tell you how wonderful this is.

Guess I'll just have to sing my gladness.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sovay

Today in my voice lesson I had more than five notes to play with. Today I have thirty-six notes to play with. What I don't have is words to tell you how wonderful this is.

Mazel tov, bird.