I spent from Monday until Friday last week without a voice. I'd had a sore throat from Tuesday or Wednesday before Easter, all through Easter, and when I got up on Monday I could barely speak. This fairly quickly turned into not being able to speak at all.
One day at work attempting to communicate with my boss and colleagues caused further damage on the Tuesday, and I was told to stay home for the rest of the week and don't speak at all.
For someone like me, who communicates all the time (I've often said I blog not because I love to write but because I never stop talking), this was a major challenge. I quickly found it exceptionally frustrating to not be able to communicate basic things with those around me. Some people were great interpreters (shout out to Lisette) and able to order food for me at the chicken shop, others had no idea what I was saying at all. Special note to the waitress who introduced me to lemongrass tea after I wanted lemon in hot water, and now I have to say I'm a bit of a fan of lemongrass tea.
After being mute for less than 12 hours I decided to test out an iPad app to speak for me, knowing that a friend of mine, acclaimed comedian Lee Ridley, uses one to do his stand up act (go watch it here).
Unfortunately the experience I had with the first app was not a particularly favourable one. Then I had the genius idea to ask Lee for a recomendation. Soon I had my hands on Speak It! and was happily typing away.
I quickly discovered, however, there are some fairly major challenges with being unable to speak. I couldn't convey any emotion, particularly tricky when the Viking got frustrated with me and I wasn't able to say anything in my defense that didn't sound like a smart arse response.
I couldn't control the way certain words were pronounced, and “okay” sounded really rude whenever I said it.
I couldn't raise my voice loud enough to be heard in a busy cafe, hence the lemongrass incident, and certain words were almost impossible to mime, like Nurofen Plus, which I ended up miming by locating a packet of regular nurofen, taking it to the pharmacist, pointing at the word “nurofen” and making a plus sign with my fingers. That took 3 goes to get across, but we got there.
Mostly I've noticed that people react differently to you when you can't speak. People were gentle with me, speaking softly and whispering like that would somehow make me feel better. Even my boss, when I was whispering answers to him, started whispering his responses. Which, if you knew my boss, would be quite an interesting thing to see.
Overall I've found that people are quite nice to me, which is a relieving thing to see, although mostly that's been because they think I'm sick. I wonder if that would change if they thought I would be like this forever.
Have you ever been without a voice? How did you find it?
