Surgically Changing My Voice

By Kelly Ann


Kelly Ann has gracious consented to share some of her experiences having vocal chord surgery to change her voice.
This is the second installment of her story. Subscribers can catch up by reading the first part of Kelly's story

Early September 1996

Voice surgery: I like to call it throat surgery because it encompassed and affected my entire throat area.

It has been 7 weeks now since my throat was operated on by Dr. Toby Meltzer and Dr. Edwin Cohen of OHSU in Portland. The sorness is still there as is the difficulty in swallowing, and occasional choking, although it is improving. The whiny violin sound strikes only in the evening now as the voice tires from working all day. In the morning it sounds good to everyone.

However my throat muscles tend to constrict during stress rasing the pitch of my voice by as much as an octave and a half above where it now stands normally. A few weeks post-surgery I had a voice frequency hovering around 350mhz. Since then it has dropped to probably around 250-275mhz. But stress can send it back up to the post-op range in no time. Then the voice and the throat become painful to live with.

My throat muscles constrict easily under various conditions causing the discomfort and difficulty in talking and swallowing. This was invasive surgery into a very sensitive area of the body. This surgery is also one of the most effective transitional surgeries next to SRS itself.

The trach shave took the longest and was the least troublesome to recover from. This is a surgery, like many other plastic reconstructive surgeries, that is performed while the patient is awake and fully aware as you must speak during the process.

It was recommended that I seek voice therapy from a trained voice coach/therapist to learn how to talk all over again.

Right now I feel there is a slight chance it may need redoing and I'll certainly discuss this with the surgeon when I return in October for my breast augmentation.

Am I glad to have had the surgery? Absolutely! I get no more "sirs" on the phone and I can see doubt removed from the faces of people whom I meet for the first time in public once I speak to them. If looks don't give you away, the voice certainly will. I still have slightly visible male features in my face in spite of the enormous amounts of hormones and anti-androgens I consume everyday which have completely altered my body shape. Those slight facial anomalies can cause wonder when meeting people. The voice surgery puts all whom I encounter at ease with me and the social intercourse is nothing more than that between a woman and whoever.

OBTW.....I was present in the OR and videotaped my SO's throat surgery. I got some great shots of the inside of her throat and of the entire procedure. It was erie to see a "second mouth" open wide on my SO as that is exactly what it looked like. She video taped mine as well. I got her molar implants and labiaplasty on video too. She will be taping all my subsequent surgeries, God willing I have them, including my SRS. If I see Dr. Meltzer in Portland, that is. He's a good doctor and is very familiar with the transgendered community and knows what we want. He had no reservations with allowing us to tape each other's surgeries.


Marilyn Wardlaw's Comments

I am Kelly Stiles SO and as she mentioned I had voice surgery in Portland also. Mine was performed by Dr. Everts not Dr. Cohen like hers.

I started off with a voice that I retrained (I sang opera professionally at one time) into a voice that was good enough that they refused to do me the first time (190-210 hertz). I later found out though that I constantly had to think about placement as the voice would not lock into place. The voice therapist I saw called it a "Jim Carey or Chameleon" style voice, i.e., easy to shift but too easy.

Now post three weeks after the operation the voice seems to have settled into about a nice 230-250 hertz range and whenever I play back messages that I periodically send myself even I can't detect any male sound to it. I lost about one octave of singing range (down to two octaves) and went from a baritone to a mezzo-soprano. Great fun now to be able to sing Christine Diaes parts from "Phantom of the Opera" with very little effort!


Notes from Kelly:


Dr. James I. Cohen and Dr. Edwin C. Everts of the ENT clinic at OHSU are the primary doctors that do the voice surgery and trach shave and they did my lover Marilyn and myself. The cost for a trach shave and voice surgery is $3500 with a guarantee also, no kidding, or they do it over or undo it for free.

The address is:

OHSU
Physicians Pavilion, suite 250
Mail code PV-01
3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road
Portland, OR 97201 USA


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