Three Months Without Breathing
At 24, I stopped being able to speak or breathe. I thought I was dying, but it was more than that.
When I was 24, I thought I was dying.
It’s hard to remember the exact order of events now. I think it started in December. It was winter, anyway, and my husband had been laid off some time before. We had two small sons and one income. It was after COBRA ran out, that’s for sure. Anyway, there had been a lot of stressors. Then, I suddenly started having trouble breathing.
At first it seemed like an ordinary winter illness. Some of the time my voice was gone. I had laryngitis and congestion, I told myself.
But it quickly got worse, and weirder. With laryngitis, when you try to speak, your voice comes out in a whisper or not at all. When I tried to speak, my voice, if it came out at all, came out strangled. I had trouble saying more than a few words at a time, my voice croaking and words slurred or over-pronounced. I stuttered and gasped. I started leaving out words that weren’t essential, breaking my sentences down into telegrams, paid by the word or even the letter. Big words were a thing of the past.
Or, as I would have said it then: Big. Words. Gone.
Then other things started to go. I would try to walk and would fall down, my legs bending like rubber beneath me. I used to be a cross-country runner, and I had a particularly self-flagellating and unhealthy approach to this. I decided that I was being weak, that a person who really wanted to walk would be able to do so, and I would force myself up from where I’d fallen again and again, only to collapse into an angry heap. I bruised all over.
In the midst of all of this, I was wrangling two sons, one four and one just turned two, and a husband who had to find work to support us. Things very quickly began to deteriorate at home. The kids watched a lot of DVDs that my husband checked out of the library for us; we fed them whatever was easiest and cleaning became a thing of the past. My husband cleaned as much as he could, but it’s a task that neither of us relishes or does especially well, even when everyone’s healthy and upright, and really, other tasks were coming before cleaning on the list of priorities at this point.
I couldn’t really walk anymore, but I could crawl, so I could get to the bathroom and down the stairs to the kitchen a few times a day. I could signal the two-year-old over for a diaper change. I could walk to the car leaning on my husband. My world got smaller.
It wasn’t just the physical world that got smaller. Not being able to talk changed the way I thought. That expedient way of talking, breaking things down into its smallest parts, started to take over my inner monologue. I started thinking like Tarzan talks, and it scared me. Could I be a smart person when my thoughts had become largely monosyllabic and broken? Was it still an inner life when it was all so basic?
Sometimes when I was lying in bed, awake but not very alert, my fingers would turn blue. That changed my thinking, too. I thought about what was easiest. I thought about what I could do to be comfortable (not much). I thought about how scared I was.
Women are socialized to swallow pain with a smile. We are taught to put ourselves last and others first, to make the dinner and then serve ourselves the worst cut, the most nourishing morsels reserved for those we do and should love more than ourselves.
Like many women, many mothers in particular, I’d had the fantasy of a mysterious ailment that would send me on a hospital vacation. I’d get sick, but not sick enough to die, just sick enough to have to rest and have someone else do it all for me. I’d get a few weeks in a bed somewhere where other people brought me my meals and no one needed me.
After my illness, it struck me: why did my fantasy of relaxation still require me to suffer? If I was daydreaming, why not make it a solo vacation I’d take after winning the lottery or something? Why did I need an excuse, even in my own imagination, for wanting some time alone, some time not serving others?
We didn’t have insurance, but my mother offered to pay for me to go to a doctor, and luckily, the doctor I’d been seeing when we had insurance was willing to continue to see me even without it. My husband drove me to her office, and she examined me. When she put the stethoscope up to my chest and brought it back down, she looked anxious.
“I can’t hear any air moving at all,” she said.
Obviously air was moving, some air. I was conscious, although sometimes I lolled close to unconsciousness, and I was alive, and I could croak out a few words every so often. There was air. There just wasn’t very much air. Not enough.
One thing I did with my day to feel like I wasn’t losing everything was to post, a lot, on a parenting board. I had been a member there before I lost my breath, and my membership became that much more important when I couldn’t talk. Even though my conscious thoughts had become very basic, when I typed out a message to post on this board, I suddenly had all my words again, the vast span of them. It was the only thing that made me think that whatever the important “I” might be, it was still present. I wasn’t just a thing made of nerves and sinew or a puppet with tangled strings. I was still a person.
When I would try to talk to my husband, it would take long minutes to get out a single broken sentence. Both of us were frustrated with the process and he would frequently offer me a pad of paper and a pen. I hated that. I found writing out an in-person conversation horrible, even though it was an opportunity to have more words at my disposal. My husband could respond immediately to whatever I wrote or spat out, slowly, and then it was another interminable few minutes while I struggled to respond.
Online, the conversation didn’t move so fast, and I could keep up. Because I’d written about it, people on the forum knew that I couldn’t talk, that I was scared about my health, but for them, my voice hadn’t changed.
My vanity in the real world was badly damaged. My voice was croaking and harsh and my words were broken. My hair wasn’t washed as often. My body was slumped and loose. I had to lean on another person to walk. People reacted to me with alarm. I felt ugly, stupid, broken. I might be dying. Online I still might be dying, but I was a whole person with whole thoughts and words.
When I can breathe, I have a beautiful speaking voice. It’s not modest to say so, but fuck modesty. That’s a virtue promoted to keep women from owning their gifts, and I don’t take my voice for granted now. I have a nearly identical voice to my mother, and her mother, and it’s a lovely voice, deep and full toned. People used to tell me I should be on the radio, and I have been on the radio, a couple of times, and I got compliments on my voice each time. I can’t sing very well, but when I speak, I usually sound competent and older than I am, which has been useful to me as a person who had kids at a very young age.
I’m a better writer than I am an extemporaneous speaker, but I’m a good speaker. I did community theater for many years as a kid, trained my voice, learned to project and to pronounce words carefully, learned to emote and to read aloud. Losing that was a blow I wasn’t really prepared for. Vanity is never more evident than when it takes a hit. Mine was laid out flat.
I heard a lot of theories while I waited for a diagnosis. Vague theories, because none of the doctors I saw had seen anything quite like what I had. It might be my heart. It might be my lungs. I was sent in for a chest X-ray, and the results said I was having an asthma attack. In that same hospital, they decided to give me a breathing treatment, the kind given to asthmatics, and something went wrong. They strapped a little mask onto my face, turned on the machine, and left. I was alone in the room, trying to breathe behind the mask, to inhale the medicine that the machine was steaming into my face, and it wasn’t working. I was there a long time, long enough that I was pretty sure I’d been forgotten by the medical team, which as it turned out I had been. The steam kept coming, and I couldn’t make enough noise to get attention, couldn’t walk out of the room to get attention, so I just lay there and let the steam come.
Eventually a man (I don’t remember if he was a nurse or an orderly or what) came back into the room and apologized for forgetting about me. Then he took another look at me, became alarmed, and asked if I was passing out. I was. What happened next felt entirely unreal. A bunch of people ran into the room and hovered over me. I saw them through a haze, awake, but on the edge of not-awake. One of them yelled, “Check her vitals!” and I heard that and felt more unreal because I’d only ever heard that on television. They did things to my body, things that I noticed but didn’t really process, and eventually wrapped me in a metallic blanket. I don’t really remember much else, just the weird floating feeling of helplessness. I couldn’t ask for help, couldn’t make them remember me. I just had to wait.
My doctor looked at my chest X-ray and didn’t seem to get much information from it. She sent me to a respiratory specialist. At this point, I was three months into my ordeal. I didn’t go to the doctor right away when it seemed less serious and when I knew I didn’t have insurance. But it had been three months nonetheless and there were no answers and I was losing more and more functions as my body and brain were denied oxygen.
This long delay made it all the more striking when I walked into the respiratory specialist’s office and he diagnosed me the moment I tried to speak. He didn’t even have to wait to hear what I said. I started to make sounds and he said, “It’s not your lungs. It’s your vocal cords.”
I have a condition called Vocal Cord Dysfunction. The way it was explained to me was like this: normally, when you talk, your vocal cords flutter open and shut, and when you’re silent, they automatically open and relax. But for some people, people who are holding stress in their bodies, the vocal cords can close even when they aren’t speaking. Normally, this happens in short bursts and often mimics exercise-induced asthma very closely. In my case, for reasons unknown, my vocal cords snapped shut and stayed that way. Since it was stress-related, as I became more stressed by my unknown condition, it got worse.
National Jewish Health, a Denver hospital that specializes in respiratory ailments, says that Vocal Cord Dysfunction “first appeared in medical literature in 1951 and was characterized as a symptom of ‘lying’ by the patient.”
It’s not that I’ve ever been as patient or kind or complaint-free as I feel I’m supposed to be, but I must have been good enough at swallowing pain. I swallowed so much it nearly stifled me.
Many of the drugs that women used to be offered in labor (and maybe still are) did little to reduce pain; they were just designed to keep the women quiet. You would still hurt, but you couldn’t inconvenience others by making them notice your hurt. My illness was like this. My body, stressed to breaking by caring for others, shut down my ability to make them notice my pain.
There have been multiple studies showing that men think women who talk at all are talking over them or talking more than them, even when in fact men are still dominating the conversation. We treat it as a truism that women talk too much; we say that they “chatter” or “gossip,” implying that the topics they talk on are frivolous. We treat women’s words like clutter: profuse, unwanted, valueless, and a woman’s job to clear away.
When I was sick, I stopped taking up room. I got literally smaller, literally lost my voice. I stopped going out, stopped being seen. If I hadn’t also withdrawn my household labor, I might have become the Perfect Woman.
My dysfunctional vocal cords and I went to physical therapy, where I was supposed to learn how to manually force my vocal cords open when they wanted to slam shut. It was unlike physical therapy I’d had in the past, mostly a series of breathing exercises. No one has ever died of Vocal Cord Dysfunction, so just the knowledge that I wasn’t dying helped, though it also embarrassed me. I’ve had a lot of health problems and often envisioned myself as the weak animal in the herd, the one who’d be culled by jackals in a more Darwinian playing field, and now I felt like it was my weak brain that was making my body weak.
Breathing is unconscious. We do it by rote, never learning how, just taking breath in and letting breath out. But I had to think about my breathing or I wouldn’t do it. The fear of not breathing took on its own life, even as I regained my ability to speak. Getting in an argument would shut my cords again in an instant. Trying to talk about bad memories or emotional topics left me gasping. Worrying about what would happen if I had a panic attack while driving led to panic attacks when I’d even think about driving.
My muscles had atrophied from three months in bed, and I had to relearn how to walk as well. I signed up for a yoga class, thinking it was a more gentle form of exercise that would help me rebuild muscles. I didn’t do a lot of research first, just picked one close to my home and went. I staggered in, whey-faced and skinny, barely able to speak or stand, and it quickly became clear I was in the wrong place. The workout was strenuous, I could do almost none of it, and the instructor seemed frightened of me and my obvious wrongness.
Getting better wasn’t simple. It was long and painful and the repercussions lasted for years. I was so afraid of ending up back in that scary place that all sorts of ordinary activities became triggers for panic, even as I was overall improving. I still have times when I’m talking to someone and, as we start to talk about something emotionally difficult, my vocal cords snap shut. I can open them now, though, through force of will. I take a breath in through my nose and then breathe out, hard, through my throat with my mouth tightly shut. It’s not a perfect fix, but I don’t stop breathing. If someone listened to my chest with a stethoscope, they’d hear air moving.
But I did get better, slowly. Even the fears lessened over time. I don’t panic when I think about driving now. I can consciously talk myself through something scary. I still deal with chronic pain and physical disability, and I’m probably more cautious than I’d be if I had never stopped breathing. That’s not all bad. I had a tendency before to disbelieve my body, to think that if I was sick or couldn’t do something, it was all about a lack of willpower. I’d stand up over and over and fall down until my body was bruised. I believe my body more now. I rest before I’m fully exhausted.
There’s something in this: learning to breathe, learning to take up space, to ask for help. Learning to embrace self and selfhood. I love my children and my husband, but I don’t want to be second to them in my own life. I don’t want to teach my sons to expect women to serve them first, or to teach my daughter that she must shrink herself and her words to please others. And I need to remember that my individual example isn’t enough to counter all of the other messages my children will be receiving. My husband never wanted a silent wife or a household drudge, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t imbibing poisons from a culture that still suggests these extremes as ideals alongside other pernicious sisters, like the sexy wife and the financial helpmeet. All of these Perfect Women exist to serve the changing needs of others.
I love books and when I became a parent I depended on them more than ever, but fictional mothers wrecked me. I held myself up to them — to fake people! — and catalogued the ways in which I didn’t live up. I was upset that I couldn’t be as patient and kind as human beings who only ever existed on a page to serve someone else’s plot. This is awful and ridiculous, but it’s also not uncommon. We learn to mother not just from our own human, imperfect mothers, but from the mothers of our stories, and the mothers of our stories are remarkably smooth and accommodating. They stand as impediments to adventure and a soothing balm to our return from adventure. They live for others. They teach us that it’s right to live for others. They teach us that a good mother is never her own self.
When I was deep in the depths of despair over my weakness, my physical therapist told me: You can tell yourself this happened because you were weak, but another way to look at it is that you were so strong. You were carrying so much stress for so many years, and you were standing up under it. You kept going and going, long past the point that your mind and body could take it. And then your body broke down, because you’d been so strong for so long.
Our strengths can break us.
Several years ago, I started seeing a new chiropractor and as I was lying on his table, he said, “Wow, were you trained in breathing?” And I laughed, because who is trained in breathing? A beat later, I realized, I am. Yes, I said. Yes, I was.
