A Trickster the Size of a Grain of Rice

This essay first appeared in my newsletter, so if you read it there, don’t bother to read this again! Also, thank you all so much for your kind words and prayers for my upcoming surgery. I feel very reassured after several of you related your professional or anecdotal experience. I am SURE I am going to be fine! Since I wrote this, we took my eldest to college for the first time, and having survived that (barely) came home to celebrate our youngest’s 16th (!!!!!) birthday. So in order to not feel my feelings about all that change, I’m reposting this essay. Photos are entirely random.

I have a condition called “Hyperparathyroidism,” a hard word to remember and unpleasant to speak, with its eight syllables and annoying trochaic meter (HYperPAraTHYroidISm) making it sound like the hammer to the head that it is. In short, one or more of my parathyroid nodes––tiny rice-grain-sized things that encircle the thyroid––are diseased and tricking my body to steal calcium from my bones, leading to osteoporosis (which I’ve had for many years) and potential kidney stones (which I have not).

Other than the aforementioned kidney stones, which I understand are more painful than childbirth, the general symptoms are merely bothersome: lethargy, which I deal with by drinking caffeine, constant thirst, which I deal with by drinking a lot of water. Constant need to pee, which is…well, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And of course the ever-present danger of falling and breaking my hollow little bones.

The only cure for this condition is surgery. Generally it’s not a big deal. A few hours, inpatient is what I’m told. A scar in the neck. But one of the main risks for surgical patients is hoarseness, sometimes permanent, and other changes in the voice. I’ve read that singers who have this surgery tend to lose three notes from their upper range.

About twenty years ago we performed with Joan Baez at Sanders Hall––I was in my late thirties. When we gushed over how unchanged her voice was, she said to us, “Just make sure you get yourself a good voice teacher and you’ll be able to sing forever.”

At the time, it didn’t even occur to me that I wouldn’t be able to sing forever. And I had a great voice teacher, so I was all set, plus here was Joan Baez standing right in front of me, having just sung like an angel a few minutes before.

But voices do change if we don’t take care of them. Sometimes they change even if we do take care of them. Towards the end of his life, Pete Seeger could barely sing a note.

I told my endocrinologist that surgery wasn’t worth the risk to my voice.

She’s from Hungary, about my age, and I really like her and trust her. But she said, “Well, really, how long do you plan to be singing for your living?”

I didn’t get angry at her for asking that–I guess it’s not an unreasonable question. She’s never heard of my band. Most people haven’t. I don’t take that personally, and I never have, probably because there are about a zillion musicians out there that I’ve never heard of either.

Still, I told her what our one-time manager Charlie Hunter told me back at the very beginning of our career about the kind of audience folk and country artists are gifted with. Lifers, he called them. Just like me. 

“I’m a folk singer. What that means is our fans have stuck with us. They are aging right along with us, and they’re loyal. They don’t expect us to crack the Top 40. I plan to be singing for the rest of my life.”

She nodded. “Good. But be aware that these symptoms aren’t so bad right now. They will get worse. And the surgery will go better the younger you are.”

I told her I’d go visit the best surgeon in the area, just to gather intel. No promises, and of course by the time I got an appointment it was five months later. Tom came with me. (He’s the best.)

The surgeon did a CT scan, poked my neck, confirmed my diagnosis, and recommended surgery. I told him I was a singer and that I was very worried about damage to my voice. He said, “Oh? Where do you play? My wife and I love to go out to music. There’s this great bar, where this guy…”

“We just got back from Chicago and Ann Arbor,” I said, feeling exhausted once again at having to justify my concern about losing the main instrument of my professional life, the essence of how I connect with the world. “We’ve made twenty-one albums. You can hear us on Spotify or YouTube or whatever.” 

“Wow,” he said, suddenly taking me seriously, though that was probably because I started to cry. 

Tom moved his plastic chair closer to put his arm around me. “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “It’s just that…I know I have a whole lot more albums inside of me, and I want to be able to make them.” 

The surgeon said, “Listen. I have done thousands of this particular surgery, and I have never ever injured a voice. I will not hurt yours. I will take care of you.”

The great gift of being any kind of artist is that we have the opportunity to turn our loneliness, our grief, our swirls of discord into something beautiful, useful, a kind of braided rope we throw out into the world, not knowing if anyone else might catch hold of it. My surgery is scheduled for just a couple weeks from now, on September 4. I heard at a meeting recently, “Worrying is praying for what you don’t want.”

So I am not going to worry. I’ll go boldly into this neck-scarring experience, holding onto the hope that soon my bones will be stronger, my energy will be rocketed to the twenty-fifth dimension, and my family will start referring to me as “Your Camelness” because of the rarity of my needing to interrupt everything in order to find a public bathroom for the second time in an hour. 

(Below is a shot of my work space in the Adirondacks. This could be an image of my mind.)