Reddit mentions of Even My Voice Is Silence: A Palestinian-American Woman's Journey "Back Home"

Thank you so much for bringing up this issue and for offering your help. I feel really fortunate that I can say that I trust my medical team fully. I can only imagine how much harder this would be if I didn't.

They were indeed bilateral vocal cysts, diagnosed at UCSF's Voice and Swallowing Center by Dr. Mark Courey (who is now the chief of Laryngology at Mount Sinai). You can see the cysts here. They're HUGE. As you can see from that post, the surgery was successful.

I'm at Kaiser now, instead of UCSF. It's objectively not as good as UCSF. I've seen two different vocal surgeons to get their assessment. Here is what my vocal cords look like now. It's totally different than the cysts. What they both say is that they aren't 100% sure if it's polyps or nodules, but the goal is to avoid surgery if possible. If they haven't gotten smaller in another 6 weeks or so, surgery will be an option on the table. That's when SLP comes in.

My current speech pathologist now ran the speech pathology department at Kaiser in Oakland for over a decade. She's not as good as my previous SLP (shoutout to Soha Al Jurf who changed my life in more ways that I can begin to explain), but I trust that she knows what she's doing, based on my experience with her thus far.