The Fat Lady Singeth Not

Well folks, it ain't over yet (as you may have gathered from the title). I ended up getting stuck in San Diego with car trouble so I got home a few days later than originally planned (and in fact ended up flying because there was no end in sight for poor Johnny 5). I was able to reschedule the speech pathologist for August 4th. What a bitter-sweet day that was. One minute I was rejoicing at Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling and moments later I was sitting in my car with tears streaming down my face at the prospect of having to continue to put my life on hold.

I sat down in the blue vinyl chair and waited for Dr. B to prepare the equipment. As she did, she asked me if I'd done everything she'd prescribed during my last visit. I proudly announced that I'd done her one better, that I'd spent the entire month of July in silence, checked myself in to a health clinic and followed a raw vegan diet. "But how did it go with the stuff I told you to do?" "Um, well I sorta' replaced it with an entire month of silence...." My heart sank. The enormity of the situation, the sacrifices I'd made, seemed to be lost on her. "Well, let's see...." She approached, equipment in hand, and my stomach did a few flip-flops in anticipation of finding out if a month of silence and flavorless food was enough to vanquish the polyps. I leaned forward with my back upright as she held my tongue down with one gloved hand and inserted the arguably phallic apparatus with the other. "LLLLLLLLLLLLL" I sang out, my attempt at an "EEEE" thwarted by probes and outstretched tongue. Again. "LLLLLLLLLLLL." She huffed and pulled the apparatus out, changed it's position and reinserted it. Again. "LLLLLLLLLLL." This went on for another five minutes, changing the angle of the camera, changing the pitch of my voice, changing the gauze to hold my tongue an impossible distance from my mouth. Finally she took the camera out for the last time and heaved a woeful sigh. "Well, it took several tries and the right angle to see them because they're so small, but they're still there. I nodded my head and said, "Okay," stoically, as if that had no bearing on my life whatsoever. Meanwhile my insides erupted in a volcano of emotion. She angled the computer screen toward me and played the video, pausing it so I could see the eensy weensy bumps that are still impeding my ability to get full closure on my vocal cords as I produce sound. She was cold and almost mean in her interaction with me which made it all the harder to receive this news. I don't think she knows just what this means to me. I don't think she understands, even as a speech pathologist whose job it is to understand, the colossity (my new word for the day) of the situation. She asked me a question and after speaking a few words, tears started forming at the edge of my eyes and the lump in my throat had nowhere to go but shakingly into the air as I spoke. At that moment she began to treat me with a little more kindness. At that point, perhaps, she realized just how seriously I'm taking this, and just how awful this news was.

She asked me what I had on my plate. I told her I was starting rehearsal that night for a new show. "What's the character? What do you have to do?" That night was going to be my first time reading the script, so I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to have to do, but I told her it was sketch comedy and therefore each sketch would require a different character. She pursed her lips and shook her head. "You see, that's where you can get into big trouble." She went on to explain that if I did this project I risked not only reversing the progress I'd made, but making it harder for my body to heal down the line. If I took on a project like that before being completely healed, I would spend the rest of my life teetering between being healthy and not; it would be an endless cycle of doing a project, and then having to take time off to heal... doing a project, taking time off to heal. I didn't want to live like that, did I? But then she told me to go to the rehearsal, find out what kind of characters I would have to play, and then Monday at our first speech pathology appointment we could work on it. So she was advising me against it but then supporting it at the same time. I'm realizing through all of this that I really need people to be direct with me. Cut and dry, no two ways about it. My life seems to be full of making difficult decisions based on polar opposite options. When the choice is life or death (in this instance life being allowing myself to heal and enjoying a long career down the line, and death being doing something NOW, before I'm physically ready and potentially ruining my career) don't give me the option to choose death. If you approve of it, I will think it's a viable option, especially if it means I won't have to effect other people's lives in the process. She created a still photo of my cords and wrote a new list of instructions to follow in my day-to-day life. I waited for the printer to finish spitting out my doom, and clenched my throat muscles around the lump to keep the tears in.

I left the room and went into the lobby to make my next appointment. As I waited for the receptionist to call me over the lump in my throat released full force and there was no stopping it. Tears started streaming down my face, pooling in the creases of my neck. I was beckoned by the receptionist and apologized, trying in vain to wipe away the mess of tears as I approached. What a sight I must have been. One of the women behind the desk got me some kleenex as the other one helped me schedule four future appointments for speech therapy. The tears stopped as I became distracted by appointment-making but as soon as I got outside and began walking, they came flooding back. I didn't even know what to do with myself. I went to my car (actually it was my dad's car, which I was borrowing while he was out of town and Johnny was still in San Diego) opened the door, sat in the driver's seat and cried. Then I cleaned myself up, straightened my back and took a deep, get-ready-to-be-human-again breath, when another wave of emotion came barging in and the sobbing returned. So it went for almost an hour. I was near the gym and in no mood to drive, so I locked the car and went to work it all out of my body.

I didn't want to quit the show. I'd wanted to work with this company since I knew of its existence and this was going to be my first opportunity to do so. I felt like my professional reputation would be on the line if I had to drop out; I didn't want to be pegged as a flakey actor because that couldn't be further from the truth. I didn't want to deal with this any more. Why couldn't it just be over? Why hadn't the throat fairy made it all better by now?

I'd find a way to do it without detrimental effects, perhaps hold back in rehearsal and save the gusto for performance. I went to rehearsal that night intending to talk to the director before it began, but for some unknown reason (it was a seemingly normal Wednesday night) traffic was horrendous. I got there on time but not early, as I'd hoped. I rang the buzzer and waited for someone to come let me in. I saw Andy's beaming face (he is always smiling) through the window as he came bounding down the stairs. He opened the door and we exchanged a warm, gracious (on my part) hug. Andy is the one who contacted me about auditioning for this project in the first place. I wasn't able to attend the auditions but despite that fact, and without hesitation, he invited me to come to the callbacks. I was, essentially, there because of him. As we started up the stairs to the rehearsal room, Andy said, "Your blog is so inspiring." I didn't even know he had been reading it! "Oh, thank you!" I said, and upon realizing there was someone there who knew what I'd been going through, I couldn't help but say, "Well, it's not over yet." And I told him the nutshell version of my appointment with the speech pathologist and alluded to the fact that I might not be able to do the show. We arrived at the rehearsal room so I said a final, "It's all gonna be okay." before breaking off and meeting the other people in the room. He smiled and said, like a cheerleader trying to lift someone's spirits, "Yeah, it will!"

Andy was the only person I knew. Everyone else was a stranger and everyone was there - writers, actors, lighting designers, stage managers, company members who weren't working on the show but wanted to be there for the first read-through, everyone. In the first act I played everything from a potential cannibal to an 80-year-old woman to an uptight boss with a deadline. I was ultra conscious of my voice and the words of my doctor rang in my head. I was holding back. For a first impression, I felt, this was not going well... I wasn't even able to let them know beforehand that I would have to be careful. I felt like a terrible actor and an even worse comedienne. Sketch comedy should be my forte but I felt, in that moment, like a steaming pile of failure. I realized that I couldn't go through the rehearsal process feeling like that. Holding back isn't really in my vocabulary and it would either make me feel terrible (not to mention be unfair for everyone else involved) or I'd say fuck it and go back to my old ways which could be dangerous at this point. Neither of those options seemed viable and I could feel the volcano of emotion smoldering within. We got to the end of act one and took a 5-minute break. As Andy passed by me I said, "See how I'm holding back?" "Yeah," he said as a little somberness crept into his otherwise cheery disposition. He sat in the chair beside me and we started talking and I started crying and all hell broke loose. Well, all hell broke loose internally, anyway. He offered to wait after rehearsal to talk to the director with me. I was so grateful to him in that moment, I can't even express it fully. I don't know why, but it was important to me to have backup. To have someone there who knew my story and could vouch for the validity of my woes was invaluable, it made me feel like less of a failure, like I would somehow be taken more seriously and not cast off as a flake. After rehearsal I waited for the room to clear, waited for a production meeting to conclude, waited to have a discussion that I never wanted to (nor dreamed I would have to) have....