With my voice gone, I was doomed to a life of isolation

By Samuel Haft as related to Barbara Bensoussan

Chapter 1

MY story begins back in 2012, as I was finishing a degree in accounting at Lander College. I was learning with my chavrusa, and after a few hours I began to feel my voice getting tired. We paused for a bit and resumed learning afterward, and I didn’t think much of it.

But as time went on, I began experiencing voice fatigue more and more, with all my chavrusas. I would have to either take a break or ask that they do all the reading so I could rest my voice.

I had always loved singing in synagogue and the Shabbos table, and now I couldn’t sing as well as I used to.

“It looks like Hashem is taking away my singing voice so that I’ll have to start actually paying attention to the words,” I joked.

At first, I thought I was simply suffering from a winter cold, but as time went on, things escalated to the point where it hurt to say anything. When learning with my chavrusas became impossible, I knew I had an issue.

Soon things got worse. My voice was so vulnerable that if I overused it at any point during the day, I would need to rest it for three days to recover. And it affected me in so many ways, big and little. Sometimes people wouldn’t hear me well, and I’d simply agree with them rather than have to answer them. When I asked the gas station attendant for $25 worth of gas and he said, “I didn’t hear you, did you say $35 of gas?” I just nodded; it was easier that way.

“I’d like the chicken burger,” I’d tell a waiter when going out to eat, but when he repeated, “Did you say the beef burger?” I’d just resign myself to that.

Of course, my lack of voice went much further than just affecting my gastronomical options. I never knew in advance if I’d be up to a visit from a friend or going out on a date. A few times people hit or scraped my car (nothing major, thankfully), but I just waved it off; the alternative — a long discussion and an exchange of phone numbers and insurance information — was beyond my abilities.

Between 2013 and 2015, the problem came and went. After graduating, I’d taken a job as a CPA, where I managed to get by; fortunately, the work didn’t require too much speaking to people. I wasn’t able to socialize much, but I could still have a 20-minute phone conversation or a one-hour face-to-face conversation.

I consulted doctor after doctor — I must have gone to 20 different ones over the years — but no one could get to the source of my problem. “It’s a vocal cord issue,” said one doctor. But the medicine he prescribed didn’t help. “Allergy-related,” said another, but the meds he prescribed didn’t help either. “It might be psychological,” said a third, but the psychologist I saw at his urging was also a dead end.

I didn’t stop there. I visited many speech therapists, hoping they would have the answer, but none of them were able to fix the problem long term.