Silenced!

This is officially the beginning of Week Three for my cold.  It's nothing new, I am usually susceptible to these respiratory things, and they usually drag on (and on).  However, today I woke up literally unable to speak above a whisper.

D called the doctor and made me an appointment for 3:30 p.m.  Up to that point, our day was full of whispered comments on my side and irritable "WHAT?"s from his side.   Or his favorite, "You're mistaking me for a hearing man."

(This is also not that new for us, but the blaring TV is usually the culprit.)

So we go to the doctor, and he checks for strep and bronchitis and actually there's not much wrong with me except the irritated throat.  Prescription:  treat the symptoms and give the voice a rest.  That is, NO TALKING!

This is where I realize how very much I use my voice.   I coo to the pets.  I talk back to D.  I sing.  I babble.  And occasionally I even try to communicate.  I found myself trying to invent a gestural language on the fly, and D's response was "I refuse to play charades."

A few weeks ago my friend S went to a new dentist and found herself defaulting to ASL, and, wonder of wonders, her dentist knew sign.  But what are the odds of that happening?    Still, I wish I had that default language, even though I only know two people who sign (and one is living up north.)  Or I wish that more people knew how to lip-read.

Actually, I occasionally think about learning sign,  but I know that my follow-through will be non-existent.  I keep trying and failing to revive my long-lost German and Spanish, and if I can't manage with languages I learned as a child, what are the odds my adult brain can learn a new language?

Instead, I am semaphoring and writing illegible notes to D and he is saying things like "What's that?  You say Timmy's fallen down the well?"

I'm thinking, though, that this is where I learn afresh how uncomfortable I am with silence.  Not just the absence of talk, but the absence of my own voice.  We had K and J over for dinner last night, and I really wanted to talk story, but already my voice was failing.  I would rasp out things like, "Tell me more about Hawaii," in an attempt to put the conversational onus on them, but then I kept wanting to respond in kind.   It's not that I think what I have to say is that earth-shaking, it's that I don't feel connected if my mouth isn't flapping.  Which is why, I suppose, I am so sensitive to being interrupted.

Imagine how it feels to have my voice totally silenced.