A voice returns after being silenced more than a decade

A Chilliwack woman who hasn’t uttered a sound much louder than a whisper for more than decade is now able to speak clearly. While her journey to recovery started in Vancouver, her breakthrough finished in Cleveland, Ohio.

After a case of laryngitis 12 years ago Joleen Bisschop could only whisper her words. She says she did every test you could imagine from her stomach to her head and doctors were unable to find anything.

Bisschop received treatment for her diminished voice but after awhile the condition became so bad, she barely left the house. Enjoyable tasks like reading bedtime stories to her children or answering the phone was not possible.

“The odd time, there would be a tiny squeak that would give me hope that there is some noise there and maybe it would come back,” she says.

Bisschop gets emotional explaining the inability to have a “normal dinner conversation around the table” and not having the ability to chime in because everyone else in her family was talking.

But things changed for Bisschop in August when she and her husband travelled to the Head and Neck Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. While there, doctors massaged her neck and throat for hours at a time and then she had a breakthrough – she got her voice back.

“I just feel free,” she says. “I feel like I say things and can be heard and have normal conversations with my kids.”

This experience has enforced in Bisschop that miracles  still do happen today.

~ with files from Tanya Beja