What Happened When A Tick Took My Voice

By Neil King Jr.

This may seem laughably obvious, but talking is not at all like seeing or touching or hearing. Or, for that matter, walking or breathing or hugging someone with both arms. Which is to say, you don’t really notice not having a working voice until you need it. 

Of all major deficiencies, muteness is the most acceptable because it allows you to function in every other way until you fall flat or raise eyebrows in public. You can go for long snappy strolls in the countryside and feel utterly adequate every step of the way until your dog vanishes after a herd of deer and all you can do is shrug. 

I had both reason and time to think about all this when I was sent not long ago, on doctor’s orders, to a week of mandatory silence, no utterances allowed. “Not another word out of your mouth until we see you back here in a week,” the doctor said before putting me under for a little surgery on my voice box. 

It’s a long story how all this happened—how I lost my voice and then tried to regain it, step by step—and I tell it entirely in the interest of science. (If Darwin hadn’t told his story, we might still think God created all tortoises and finches.) It’s vital we get these things on the record. 

You may find it preposterous to hear that my voice problems all started with a tick. To be exact, a member of the species Ixodes scapularis that bedevils the lawns and forests of the Eastern United States. When not engorged with blood, these little pests are not much bigger than a pin head. The one that botched up my voice grabbed hold of some dim part of my body in the late summer of 2020 and squirted the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi into my bloodstream, which became Lyme disease and knocked out the proper functioning of my left vocal cord. Bing, bang, boom, just like that. 

I was staying at the time on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, roaming the woods and meadows where these tiny monsters are legion in the summer. It wasn’t unusual to pluck two or three off me in a day. Such is their sense of entitlement that my wife one morning spotted a particularly enterprising deer tick nestled in my right eyebrow.

Lyme disease is capable of many woeful effects—crushing headaches, blurred vision, insomnia, brain fog, chronic fatigue, muscle cramps—but can it really be so directed as to zap just one vocal cord? In a tiny number of cases, yes, it can. It happened, for instance, to the multiplatinum country singer Shania Twain and, well, it happened to me.

In my case, my once rumbling bass voice suddenly began to go hoarse and raspy and then in a matter of days it lost all volume. Within two weeks I was useless on the phone. People would say hello a few times and then hang up, thinking no one was there. If a river or fan or washing machine was running in the background, I couldn’t compete. 

When I finally consulted a doctor, he put a little camera down my throat and rendered a verdict: “Left vocal cord paralysis.” In late October 2020, that same doctor unfurled a syringe with a very long needle and told me to hold still as he jabbed it into my neck. He gave me a rubber ball to squeeze as in the Middle Ages and told me to please not swallow as he injected a collagen-like substance into my voice box, a life moment I won’t soon forget. The injection helped some, but still left my voice an unreliable and meagre version of its previous self. 

Friends directed me to a brilliant specialist in Philadelphia, Dr. Robert Sataloff, voice mender to the stars. You will find in his spacious waiting room glossy photos of thanks and praise from Luciano Pavarotti, Liza Minelli, Julie Andrews, and an array of other actors and singers whose 8-by-10s cover an entire wall, which in turn adjoins a wall packed shelf to shelf with books the doctor has written about all matter of voice issues.

It was Sataloff who made the Lyme connection and Sataloff, a year later, who finally performed the little surgery that was designed to put it all right. 

The good doctor put me under and then inserted a tube down my throat with a camera to have a good look at what was going on. He decided the best approach was to extract some fat from my belly and put that in my vocal cord. When I reemerged from the land of Morpheus an hour or so later, my wife put a finger to her lips to remind me I was now under a strict monastic vow of silence. 

“It’s going to take a while to adjust and get better,” she said, passing along Sataloff’s advice. “But when it does, it will be a big improvement on before.”

So off I went with my Airedale Benny to the same secluded slice of the Chesapeake where the tick had found me, except now it was early winter and not tick-strewn summer. There, I avoided most human contact and, when necessary, took to scribbling my thoughts and intentions on Post-It notes. 

**

If you lean at all toward the antisocial and find value in solitude, the inability to talk has its merits, even its attractions. I taught myself almost immediately to stop talking to my dog and only a few times uttered an expletive under my breath, as when I knocked over Benny’s water bowl by mistake. The words got lodged in my throat and went nowhere. 

Voicelessness is no issue, none at all, so long as you remain a hermit. You silently walk the heath, dog at your side, noting how voluble the rest of nature is. The wind, the dry leaves, the reeds that rim the pond, the geese and ducks, all want to make a statement and be heard. 

I was a needy case only when I went into town from time to time to pick up a few things. “Help you find something?” the guy at the hardware store said. When I did a nifty job of acting out a flyswatter, he responded right away. “Gotcha, left-hand side, aisle two.” 

My reputation as the Mute One spread so fast that the checkout lady at the grocery store didn’t ask for my phone number but just handed me the keypad so I could punch it in myself. She did it with a look of tenderness and understanding. 

I went everywhere with a yellow Post-It pad and a pocketful of Sharpies so I could translate my wishes and desires, and occasionally my grandiose observations, into little texts written in block letters. One night I went out to dinner with friends and weighed in only with little notes. “YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN.” Or: “THE LESS YOU TALK THE EASIER IT GETS.” Or: “I’LL TAKE THE MEATLOAF. MASHED POTATOES ON THE SIDE, PLEASE.” 

When I did finally test my new voice, on the morning of the sixth day out walking my dog, pretty much nothing was there. I tried to say “What a lovely morning” but it came out like the first croak of a pond frog in early spring. My voice box was broken, capable only of a wheezy utterance like air through a cracked piccolo. I assumed something had gone terribly wrong. I texted my wife, who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a week, that also being part of my monastic orders. 

“Prepare to be wholly unimpressed with my new voice,” I wrote. She was wholly unimpressed by my alarm. “You will have to give it time,” she responded. 

**

Of course, she was right. My doctor in his tenth-floor office in Philadelphia wasn’t the least alarmed. I expected to see shock on his face when I spoke like a dying fawn but when he stuck a camera down my throat to take a good look and asked me to ooh and ahh, he couldn’t have been more tickled. “It looks great down there,” he said. “It just needs time to adjust.”

My marching orders for the next few weeks were to talk for two or three minutes out of every ten. That way, I would nurse my voice back in shape without overdoing it. I did just that but as the weeks went by, it was hard to pinpoint much improvement. My voice would skitter back and forth between high pitch and low with every syllable so that I sounded like an infant warbler without a mother to put him right. If I had to emote at all it would default to a falsetto that was about two octaves higher than my normal, pre-tick range. I sounded like someone from a Fritz Lang horror film in the first days of the talkies. 

I was now able to communicate and to make basic desires known across a dinner table. I could correct the score across the length of a tennis court, but just barely. What I couldn’t do with much distinction was launch into a multi-pronged discourse on the perils of modern democracy and expect anyone to follow along or care. There are worse afflictions. 

After a few more weeks I sent an update to Dr. Sataloff. “My voice remains a feeble thing without clear signs of improvement,” I wrote. Back came his reply: “I am delighted to hear that your voice still sounds bad.” He noted that it will take months, maybe even the better part of a year, for the fat to find its balance and for my brain to adjust accordingly. 

So, 19 months into this, I am still not fit for oratory. My operatic prospects are shot. But most days, and especially days when I keep my mouth shut, I have so many other things to think about. 

Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.