Believing Isn't Always Seeing

In most of my living memory, I’ve had a soft, raspy voice. I can’t truly scream or yell, and it’s difficult to project my voice in noisy situations. I used to have people ask me all the time if I had a cold. They would usually prescribe their favorite cold remedy before I had a chance to explain that I didn’t.

It started after I had PDA heart surgery at age four, and I’ve generally assumed that it was a result of being intubated for the surgery. When I was in high school, my voice teacher’s speech teacher husband listened to my voice and guessed that I had a paralyzed vocal chord. My speech therapist friend said that therapy could help, so voice lessons were my economical speech therapy.

Last summer someone encouraged me to see if the damage is repairable. I liked the idea of seeing an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist, even just to know what the problem was, but at the time it was financially out of the question. It would have probably been close to $200 just for a consult, plus testing for what might be wrong.

Tonight I went to a clinic because I’ve had an ear infection for three weeks. I figured I’d see the general on-call physician. It was 8:00 PM on the equivalent of a Sunday night, for goodness’ sake! But as I sat in the waiting room, I looked at the sign on the wall. The doctor was an ENT.

So after he cleaned out my ears and pronounced that there was fluid in my painful ear, I asked him about my voice. In five minutes or so, he explained that my vocal cord problem could be caused by intubation or by damage to the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which is easy to damage in heart surgery. He said that intubation damage normally heals fully, however. He described the tests that they could do to determine if a vocal cord is indeed paralyzed. But when the day is over, if the nerve has been damaged, it’s virtually impossible to repair. He gave me medication for my ear, and I left.

Total cost: seven dollars and eighty cents.

I came home and took a second opinion from the mighty Google (for free). Sure enough, damage to the recurrent laryngeal nerve causes a hoarse voice. Initially most of the search results pointed to thyroid surgery as the culprit. But a quick search of PDA and recurrent laryngeal nerve damage yielded plenty of results. It causes hoarseness, it can cause trouble exercising because the airway is partially blocked. Ah, that could be why I experience a shortness of breath and rasping that has prompted a nurse friend to ask if I have asthma. It all makes sense. (Google also says that surgery may help compensate for the vocal cord paralysis, even though it can't fix the damaged nerve.)

As I read the comments on one of the articles, I teared up. Especially this one from KAB:

“I have tried my best to not let my soft, whisperer voice define me as a person. It is very tiring and often upsetting getting asked every day if you are ‘sick’ or ‘why do you talk like that’. Don’t get me wrong, I know that without the surgery I probably would have died….I thank God every day. It’s hard not to want to have a ‘normal’ voice.”

I’m not the only one who’s had these thoughts, these struggles. I just never understood what exactly was wrong. Now I do.

Evolutionists like to use the recurrent laryngeal nerve as evidence against intelligent design, because it runs an “absurdly circuitous route . . . which, if designed, could only be described as unintelligent” (Dawkins, quoted or paraphrased on Wikipedia). As one who has every reason to wish that the nerve’s path were different, I reject that nonsense. But it reminds me that God is intelligent, so he must have a good reason to wire the body the way he did. And since that is true, he also has a good reason for allowing damage to mine. I may not see it any more than the scientists yet see the purpose for the route of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. But when I do see it, I’m going to be glad that I chose to believe.