A Few years ago my life became a living nightmare. I was telemarketing, and in the middle of a call my voice faded away. My last words were, "I think I'm losing my voice. I'll call you later." A half hour later I fulfilled my promise with the hope of closing the sale. My voice quickly disappeared in addition to the possible commission. I was quickly diagnosed by one of Los Angeles' preeminent Ear, Nose, and Throat specialists that my loss of voice was treatable via speech therapy. For two months I worked with a therapist my doctor recommended. I made no progress. My world renowned doctor, and the speech therapist concluded I was a head case and that I should visit a shrink. This didn't make much sense to me. Sure, I may have been a little crazy, neurotic, obsessive, and compulsive, but my lack of voice, I knew, deep in my heart, was not some sort of reaction to a real or imagined adult or childhood trauma. I saw a psychologist who quickly concluded I may have been a little nuts, but that my voice loss was not psychologically related. I was elated that my belief was confirmed, but depressed that I seemed to be undiagnosable and untreatable. During my initial visits to my ENT specialist and speech therapist, a very good friend of mine recommended I see a Dr. Morton Cooper who had cured his father of a speech problem which innumerable other doctors had been unable to remedy. I barely paid attention. After all, I assured him, I was in the hands of the very best. Well those hands had just dropped me, and I was feeling a lot like Humpty Dumpty. As I began checking out new speech therapists, who sounded much like the one who thought I was crazy, another friend of mine, who does a lot of voiceover work in Hollywood, and is fascinated by anything that has to do with the voice, gave me a book entitled Stop Committing Voice Suicide, by Dr. Morton Cooper. His name rang a bell. This was the same guy I had ignored earlier. I read the book. I felt as if it were a personal letter addressed to me. Doctor Cooper understood the game I was being put through. One of his past patients wrote a testimonial endorsing Dr. Cooper which told the story of how his doctors thought his voice loss was a psychological manifestation. Doctor Cooper knew otherwise. He cured this patient. Today I am cured as well. I have returned to telemarketing and can talk for hours and hours on end. Thanks to Doctor Cooper's treatment and his brilliantly simple exercises I understand how to correctly use my vocal mechanism and am confident I will never lose my voice again.

N.W.