Who Am I Without My Voice?

The serious trouble started on Christmas Eve, upstate with family. The Puerto Rican side does not alternate talking and listening — each is done in spirited unison. I was speaking too loudly over other stories and my own glass of wine, fighting a head cold and getting gravelly. My boyfriend, Benjamin, caught my eye across the room, touched his hand to his throat and made his face into a question mark, What’s wrong with your voice? But we’d brought a homemade cake — he baked, I decorated — that people were freaking out about, and I didn’t want to leave before the compliments were over. I’m a professional touring musician, so I miss a fair share of the holiday gatherings, and this was the first meeting between the boyfriend and most of the assembled relatives. He’s 10 years older but boyish — tousled hair, slender, animated, a mess of bad tattoos — and I wanted to spin him around for all to see how clever and how kind.

My voice degraded in the couple of hours between family goodbyes and bedtime. Usually, I’m an expressive, flexible alto. But the pitch started sinking, the volume dimmed and syllables began to drop out like a radio not quite tuned to frequency.

I had bouts of laryngitis in the past: a few days when I sounded like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters and pantomimed smoking cigarettes with both hands to entertain friends. But my voice had been uncharacteristically unreliable in recent months. Before a gig in Seattle last October, it got so raspy that I had trouble holding a tune. For a singer and rapper performing her own material, there is no understudy. (If you live in the continental United States, I’ve probably played a city near you, and you probably didn’t hear about it. Lots of independent musicians operate under the mainstream radar — itinerant bards sharing rooms at the Ramada.) Hoping to save the show, I found a service online that dispatched a nurse to my hotel room to administer an IV drip marketed as a restorative cocktail of B vitamins. I felt pretty sure this was nonsense, but panic dissolves your commitment to empiricism. I also got a prescription for prednisone, a steroid that tamps down inflammation quickly, sometimes within hours, allowing irritated throat tissue to function smoothly. Neither the prednisone nor the infusion saved the day, and I had to call off the performance, a decision that sent shock waves of disappointment in all directions. Band members, bartenders, sound techs, openers and the merch seller had all been expecting a night of work. Fans already had tickets and babysitters. The venue had already spent promotional dollars. I’ve only canceled a handful of times in nearly two decades onstage. It feels awful.

Christmas morning my voice was worse than at any time I could remember — as if it had been lit on fire and left to burn down to powder-fine ash. My next tour was scheduled to begin in three weeks: an important run along the West Coast to support my most recent record, “Bury the Lede.” Scrapping a whole tour would mean losing tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, much of which was already spent on flights and hotel rooms or promised to other people. At my level, a serious hit.

I committed to strict vocal rest: no talking, no singing, no whispering (which is hard on the voice), no vocalization at all. I was eager to observe it dutifully — desperate to recover and perform — and would have been hard-pressed not to: I could generate very little sound at all. I communicated with Benjamin chiefly via charades, a little American Sign Language that I learned as a kid and an app called BuzzCards that I saw a deaf Lyft driver use to type his side of conversation. I drank lakes of tea and swallowed a few tablets of leftover prednisone, hoping every morning to wake up healed.