Finding His Voice Again After Cancer
When Mike Schmidt beat stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he didn’t expect to lose his voice. Tumors in his chest and neck damaged a nerve controlling his left vocal cord, leaving him barely able to whisper.
“I think that I’m relatively healthy so to hear that ‘cancer’ word is really scary,” Schmidt recalled. “I broke down in the room but knew that I could fight this and beat it too.”
The loss of his voice was life changing.
“Not having a voice really impacted my life a lot. To say I was depressed and really down on myself, absolutely,” Schmidt said. “I’m a very outgoing person… it just got easier for me to not say anything rather than explain myself.”
Dr. Robert Sonnenburg, an otolaryngologist from BayCare Clinic Ear, Nose, and Throat, explained the first step by saying, “We can do what’s called vocal cord medialization… a procedure that moves the paralyzed vocal cord over more towards the middle… to produce a stronger voice.”
Next came speech therapy with Karen Floriano-Heimerl, a speech-language pathologist.
“Part of that was learning to use his air a little bit differently and work on his breathing pattern… so that he would use his diaphragm a bit more and breath from lower down which would give him more support for his voice,” she said.
Today, Schmidt estimates he’s regained about 95% of his voice.
“I was in a space where I thought I probably wouldn’t be able to speak 100 percent again. Now, I feel great,” he said. “For those who hadn’t heard me before my diagnosis, they probably just think this is my normal voice which is really cool.”