Mother-of-three regains ability to speak after a decade through groundbreaking surgery

Do you believe in taking the leap forward? We're often stuck between taking that one step that can make or break our lives. Be it a career, a relationship or any other decision. We’ve often found ourselves in positions where we have to choose between taking a risk or throwing everything away. On one side lies all of our hard work, hope and more while on the other side is either success or failure. A similar story was shared by the Jerusalem Post of 53-year-old Shirli Aharon. 

Shirli Aharon is a married mother of three living in Eilat, Israel. She'd had been having difficulty speaking for over a decade. It affected her communication due to which she refrained from speaking much. She was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, also known as laryngeal dystonia – a neurologic disorder that can affect the voice and speech.

The disease affects the vocal muscles, thereby disrupting a person’s speech. While there is treatment, the disease can last temporarily or for a lifetime. Aharon faced the symptoms of this disease like blurry or hoarse speech, difficulty speaking and so on. You can imagine what a struggle it might have been to have something as crucial and frequent as speaking fade away. Moreover, being a mother in her 50s, it was all the more difficult for her to get through days with her speech getting worse.

Aharon expressed herself saying, “Losing my voice happened in a very long process, during which I went to countless doctors to diagnose the problem and each time they would tell me everything was fine and send me home. I was very ashamed.” She went on to say that this speech problem affected her working and financial status as well. She wasn’t able to communicate even the simplest things. “The hardest part was that my daughter had to join me shopping because I couldn’t clearly say my phone number to the cashier at the supermarket. Everything turned into a nightmare,” she said.

With bleak hopes, two years ago, she went to a doctor who referred her to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center’s head-and-neck surgeon, Dr. Yael Oestreicher-Kedem. Aharon began to receive treatment with Botox injections, which helped and managed to treat the symptoms. However, it didn’t provide a cure. Soon after, the doctor suggested an innovative operation, one that had never been done in Israel and was done in selective countries. 

Aharon decided to take a leap of faith and agreed to the surgery. A few weeks ago, she underwent the procedure by Oestreicher-Kedem and Dr. Yuval Nahlon. It was a delicate process requiring a high amount of precision and skill. The surgery was successful and when Aharon woke up, she had a clear voice to take back. Her leap forward was risky but she weighed her options and chose to take the risk. When asked how she felt, she confidently said, “I feel like I’ve been reborn. To think that until a year ago, I considered learning sign language and abandoning speech for the rest of my life. No one will stop me from speaking now.”