Creative Care Unit

Creative Care Unit Episode 3: “My silence is my self-defense”

                There are very few things that make me nervous as a performer. I’ve performed for audiences as small as 10 and as large as 6000. I thrive on getting in front of folks to do what I do best. What really makes me nervous is when a medical professional tells me that there’s a problem inside my throat, and that they’ll need to go in there with sharp objects, working perilously close to the two pieces of flesh I use to make a living, to remove it. I’m Michael E. Russo, and we’ll be discussing my tonsillectomy-how I got to that point, the operation and the aftermath-right here in the Creative Care Unit.

                I grew up in a small family on Long Island: my Dad, my Mom, me and my younger brother named Andrew (I used to say little brother, but when puberty got done with the both of us, my “little brother” wound up an inch taller, bearded and barrel chested, whereas I look like I rent what little chest I’ve got). As is the case with most families, I suppose, every one of us had an area of territory that we covered. It wasn’t a conscious sort of thing; it just sort of naturally evolved that way. Dad went to work Monday through Friday, Mom did stuff around the house and took care of us when we got home from school, and my brother and I did the things that interested us, what ever that happened to be.

We usually had dinner around 6 PM or so, and each of us had our usual spots at the dinner table. Mom sat at the spot nearest to the kitchen, I sat across from her, Andrew sat on my left at one end of the table and Dad sat at the head, where he could not only see all of us but he could also watch Jim Jensen and Walter Cronkite deliver the local and network news each night.

There was a healthy amount of conversation at the dinner table most nights. I don’t recall being told to be quiet, unless there was a news story that Dad particularly wanted to hear. Sometimes it got pretty lively. A friend of ours stayed over for dinner one night, and he practically got a case of whiplash as he kept turning his head, trying to see who said what when. My brother didn’t jump in as often as I did, but when he did, it was deadly. Whereas my sense of humor tended to be on the sloppy side, throwing anything against the wall to see if it would stick, Andrew’s struck with surgical precision.

My favorite story about my brother’s wit happened when we were in high school and I had a part time job as a janitor’s assistant in a Lutheran elementary school. The tables in the cafeteria were moved out of place and they needed to be put back the way they were. Andrew was there to help me out. The assistant principal was talking to us, explaining what had been done and what needed to be done. At the end of his monologue, he asks us, “You know how I want the tables, don’t you?”, and my brother looks at him and says, “Legs down?” I thought it was funny; the assistant principal reacted by looking at me as if it was my fault. That was my brother’s territory: being precisely funny.

Another piece of territory he covered, though I’m sure he didn’t want to, was that he became my beta tester for all things medical. He needed glasses in elementary school; I didn’t need them until I was in my mid-twenties. He had his heart attack a decade before I had mine, and when he was in kindergarten, he’d had his tonsils out.

I don’t remember much about that time, other than he’d gotten pneumonia the Christmas before, and that I was almost late for school the day he went to the hospital. I couldn’t tell you the details of his operation or his recovery, but I’m sure that if he ever does a podcast entitled “Here’s What REALLY Happened!”, he’ll tell you. I do remember that there were no complications and that he seemed pretty normal once things healed up. So, when I was told fourteen years later that I had to have my tonsils out, I wasn’t really worried. After all, my brother had his removed when he was a kid. How tough could it be?

                I have a confession to make: aside from my brother’s experience, everything I knew about tonsillitis I’d learned from Bill Cosby. I used to memorize stand-up comedy routines from records when I was a kid, and the two big faves in our house were the Italian comedian Pat Cooper and Bill Cosby. We’d had copies of Cos’ albums “Wonderfulness” and “Revenge”, and we heard them so much that I could recite entire routines by memory, down to the vocal inflections he’d use (this little talent of mine became a two-edged sword when I became a musician and actor. I can learn songs and long passages of dialog if I hear them often enough, but if I hear them too much, I start to sound like whoever happens to be on the recording. This is why I prefer to work from the printed page, rather than a recording. Leonard Zelig ain’t got nothin’ on me…).  I had his routine “Tonsils” down cold, and if copyright laws allowed it, I could recite the relevant portion here, especially since it summarized my condition perfectly: my tonsils, which act as a filter by trapping germs that could cause infections, got infected themselves (after four strep throats and Bell’s Palsy over the last three semesters at Berklee, that was no surprise) and were swollen. The best course of action was to have them removed. We scheduled an operation for Valentine’s Day, 1985, and made plans to get my problem tonsils out of my body.

                And with that, it’s time to give my voice a break. I think I’ll take a walk in the night air. We’ll be back with the Creative Care Unit in just a moment.

                Welcome back to the Creative Care Unit. I’m Michael E. Russo.

                February 13, 1985, the day before Valentine’s Day. I’m in my room in the Pediatrics section of Winthrop Hospital, my operation scheduled for the next morning (nowadays a tonsillectomy is done on an outpatient basis, but back then I spent a few days there. I understand that recovery becomes more difficult the older the patient is, and that a child will bounce back a lot quicker than someone college age. I can’t imagine how long I’d have to stay if I that operation today). I had x-rays taken and I was getting visits from the medical staff asking me all kinds of questions. One in particular stood out, because I was asked this more than once: do you smoke? No, I told them, that’s why I was in the Pediatric wing (this was the section for non-smokers. Back in ’85, you were allowed to smoke in hospitals. Not any more…). After having been asked this more than once, I finally asked what was going on. They didn’t tell you? Tell me what? We found a spot on your right lung on the x-ray, and we’re not sure if we’re going to take your tonsils out or not.

                Now, when I get news like that, I don’t get depressed or sad. I get cheesed off. Really mad. I wound up telling the doctors that yes indeed, we were going to take them out. We’ll deal with whatever is on my lung later, but right now those tonsils were coming out. Spoiler alert: after the operation I came back to the hospital and had a CAT scan done. It turns out that the spot on my lung was nothing but a calcium deposit. I’d totally forgotten about it until many years later, when I was in a different hospital’s emergency room. I thought I was having a heart attack, so I was brought straight in, and once again someone told me they’d found a spot on my lung in an x-ray. I took in the information, pointed to place on my chest where I remembered the deposit being and asked the guy who told me this if this was the spot where it was. Yes, he said. It’s calcium, I told him, and then I told him how I knew that. They asked if I still had the films from back then. Are you kidding?

                After that minor hitch, the operation went off as scheduled. The drugs they gave me to relax me before the operation were very effective, dropping my voice about a fifth lower than normal, and I had no complications during or afterwards (let me give a shout out to my surgeon, Anthony J Durante, who was and is the best around. My Mom is also one of his patients). I spent a week at home recuperating, generally resting and letting myself heal. The only thing that was a disappointment, and this is because of the expectations I had from the Bill Cosby routine, was that I got no ice cream to eat. Instead, I got blueberry Tofutti that came from a little shop at the bottom of the hill from where we lived. Now, I don’t know why I got no ice cream, nor do I know who put the bright idea in my parent’s head that Tofutti was a preferable alternative to ice cream. All I know is that I had blueberry Tofutti for the duration of my recovery. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted OK, and it didn’t make me sick to eat it, but for a guy who had visions of gallons of ice cream heading his way, it was a disappointment. I’ve made up for that over the years, and the Tofutti place is now a Thai restaurant, so I guess things eventually evened out.

                Speaking of recovery, it went well. There were no post-surgery complications (unless you consider the CAT scan I had on my lung a post-surgery complication), and I healed up quite nicely and quickly. Most of that was due to the excellent care that I received, but part of it was due to my attitude. I was cast in a musical written by my former high school English teacher and drama coach, and I did not want to miss out on being in this. I’d also heard that a mezzo soprano friend of mine from Boston Conservatory had also undergone a tonsillectomy before I did, and that it took her six weeks to get back to singing. The competitor in me rose to the occasion. Ah ha, thought I, I’ll do it in three. Sure enough, I was back on the boards in three weeks, singing in a musical and singing HARD. It’s nice when you can will your twenty-three-year-old body into normality sooner rather than later. I fully expected to be back in three weeks, and that’s what happened.

                What I did NOT expect were the changes to my instrument. Without the tonsils back there to fill the space, singing felt…different. Breathing felt different. My sound was different. Worse, I lost my voice, something that never, EVER happened to me before. I didn’t lose it during the show, thank God, and I’ve never missed a gig because of laryngitis, which I’m quite proud of, but I had to learn how to fill the space in the back of my throat differently, how to baby the voice so that I wouldn’t lose it, and that was something that would take me a lot longer than three weeks to figure out.

                Thirty-three years later, I know a lot more about how to properly use my instrument. I do things that keep my voice flexible and avoid things that could potentially damage it, either in the short or long term. I haven’t lost my voice in decades, and I know how to manipulate it to produce dark sounds like this, and brighter sounds like this. But for all of the pampering and babying I give my voice, I cannot prevent ageing from changing the instrument, and it has. This happens to everyone, regardless of their profession, and we’ll talk about that another time.

            Uh-oh! Time to act like an announcer. Roll the credits!

Support for this podcast is made possible by my long-suffering Wife (who lets me do this), copious amounts of caffeinated beverages and listeners like yourselves. If you’ve enjoyed this program, please like our Facebook page, which has links to our transcripts of the show blog and links for you to make a donation to keep this show going. 

Creative Care Unit is recorded in The Danger Room Studios of Glimmer Productions, located in the heart of beautiful Bucks County, PA. I’m Michael E. Russo. We’ll see you next time, and until then, stay well.