I’ve been in an accident! My voice is destroyed.
—AUGUST 4, 2015
The first sound I hear is a rhythmic, loud beeping that seems to be coming from a far-off place. My trapezius muscles on either side of my neck are on fire. The stabbing pain is excruciating and as I open my eyes and attempt to speak, the voice that comes out of my mouth is two octaves lower than my own, with a timbre that resembles someone with severely damaged vocal cords.
Oh my God, I think. I’ve been in an accident! My voice is destroyed.
My heart is pounding in my throat. I’m a communicator. An entertainer. My voice has been my livelihood for forty years.
The beeping is faster now. I feel a warm touch on my left arm.
“John? John? It’s me, honey. You’re in the recovery room. It went very well. You’re okay.”
I recognize Connie’s voice, but I cannot see her. There’s a film over my eyes that prevents me from focusing. It feels like trying to take a picture with the camera lens pressed against a screen door. Nothing but foreground noise and fuzzy shapes. Where am I?
I try to speak again. This time I’m aware that I’m talking through a mask, and I sound like Darth Vader after two packs of cigarettes.
“Mr. Tesh, are you in pain?” This is another voice now. It’s a nurse. Her words are the first I fully register, and they draw my attention away from what is going on around me and back into myself. I take a quick inventory of my body. Big mistake. The disorientation that was in my brain now resolves itself into a kind of clarity that my eyes still cannot achieve: Hell yes, I’m in nothing but pain.
I nod my head. Although I’m not successfully communicating with my vocal cords, my furrowed brow must be telling another story because the voice announces that she is going to give me a shot—Dilaudid, I would find out—to make me feel better. Why are my trapezius muscles on fire?
“Where am I?” I manage to squeak out a few words. This time the Darth Vader Marlboro Man has ridden his horse out of town and left one of the old Muppets characters in his place. “I’m . . . I’m so thirsty.”
And then, finally, I see Connie’s face. She looks concerned but then, forcing a smile, quickly reminds me why I’m lying in a hospital bed with a mask on my face. “You’re just out of surgery,” she says. “You’re going to be fine, Pop Pop.”
“I have to pee.”
“Go ahead,” Connie says, now with more of a playful smile on her face. “You have a catheter.”
My worst fear is now realized because what goes up must come down, what goes in . . . will eventually have to come out. Before the fear has time to turn into terror, the shot of Dilaudid has reached my brain and produces within me an intense urge to sleep.
The beeping seems like it’s outside now. Connie’s voice joins it, as her face dissolves into gauzy obscurity once again.
This is cancer.