A poem by Anne Pitkin about life challenges of Laryngectomee published in JAMA in the Healing and Poetry Section January 23, 2024

 You can do everything you did before except swim.

If you swim, water will flood your lungs

    through the hole in your neck.

I can buzz Like a swarm of hornets.

I can see and I can hear.

I can walk into a store and buy groceries.

I can answer the phone. I can talk

in a voice not my own, not the instrument

by which I think out loud to learn what I am thinking,

the instrument by which you might have known me,

    by which I taught my classes, called the dog, loved—

the instrument I songed with, guffawed with

    so people could hear me coming,

the instrument with which I imitated Ethel Merman,

Florence Foster Jenkins, Martin’s parrot,

My seventh-grade teacher saying through her nose

    I am so tired of the asinine things you kids do…

I am an iceberg’s tip, my substance mute,

the moon without a shadow, a grove without wind or birds,

a street without nuance.

What used to be fluid lines of speech puddle unfinished,

the whispered aside, the quick wisecrack beyond me.

I used to love telling the story of the drunken Brits

awaiting the end of the world, counting down,

ten, nine, eight…all the way to 1—a pause

my best cockney,

Well, it ain’t the conflagration we’d been bankin’ on.

And it ain’t.

Someone online said, I’d rather die.

I did not. I am here. I am telling you this.

Anne Pitkin

Read the original publication in JAMA