The Surgery that Brought Back Adele's Voice
Monday, February 13, 2012 at 6:02PM from scientificamerican.com
You would never have known it from her performance at the Grammy Awards ceremony on Sunday night, but the British singer Adele was not even allowed to speak for most of November and December. She had just undergone laser surgery to remove a polyp from her vocal folds, a small growth that forced her to cancel a U.S. tour and threatened to damage her sultry voice permanently. It was an extreme form of an injury that anyone can get simply by yelling too much.
The problems began last May, Adele wrote in her blog: “I made a Skype call in the morning on the day of the show and during it my voice suddenly switched off like a light! It was literally as if someone pulled a curtain over my throat.” At a show soon afterward, Adele described feeling a “ripping” sensation in her throat, which her doctors diagnosed as a hemorrhage. They ordered her to rest her voice and reschedule several performances.
A vocal cord hemorrhage such as Adele’s happens because of the physical stresses of singing or speaking. When Adele first began noticing problems with her voice, she said she had never sung so much in her life. When vocal cords areoverworked or injured, they can bruise just like other body parts—in the larynx, blood escapes the tiny blood vessels and floods the vibrating flaps that allow a person to talk or sing. The bleeding and subsequent swelling can stiffen the vocal cords and interfere with their undulations, leading to hoarseness, or in some cases (such as Adele’s) the inability to speak at all. Many people experience minor vocal cord damage after yelling at a sporting event or noisy bar. In most cases, these can be treated by simply resting the voice.
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