Isolation

The sense of isolation provoked by the loss of your tongue is real - and difficult to convey.The inability to communicate with people on the simplest level, or on a level to which you have been accustomed for more than 50 years, is disconcerting, to say the least. The few gutteral noises you are able to pronounce make you sound like a mental defective, and people treat you as such (without intending to speak disparagingly of people with mental difficulties who, to be fair, have grown up with a disability - a disability that has been dumped on me from one day to the next).

The isolation has a dual impulse. The physical difficulty of verbal communication generates a muteness or a heavily circumscribed dialogue with the outside world. The most manifest example is the conduct of any process by telephone - often impossible, and always frustrating - while relating to a shop assistant or office clerk who does not possess the amount of goodwill necessary to make an effort to understand you is not only frustrating, it is humiliating. This represents an externally imposed isolation. Then there is the internally-imposed isolation. The desire to conceal a monstrous physical appearance from the outside world (taking advantage of the loss of my beard during radiotherapy - I lost my beard, not the hair on my upper lip - I grew a moustache to divert people's attention from my physical aspect)  and shying away from the physical pain of trying to talk, and the exasperation derived from each communication failure, or the deception that each 'Eh' What did you say?' or 'I don't understand you' provokes, and the immense sadness that comes from trying to talk to your son who makes no effort to understand you, makes you want to stick at home and stay away from what has become an intimidating outside world.

This isolation is a lot easier for me to tolerate since I am essentially a solitary person. That is a plus for me (I could give a toss for the psychic damage it does to more gregarious people by comparison. Satisfaction is not relative. I do not feel better because somebody else is having a harder time then me. A rich baby cries as much as a poor baby). But my solitariness is a choice and it ceases to be wholly admissible when it is imposed. Quite often, I feel an almost painful desire to have a long meandering conversation with someone; or to go into a bar and strike up a dialogue with a complete stranger; or to utter the little stupidities that occur to me during casual contacts - with a neighbour, the girl in the supermarket check-out, a shop attendant, or an old lady in the street laden with shopping.

Let's try something. What does this mean?  "o ake a unni chump..." (See what I mean?)

Then there is a positive side to it. You do not have to take part in a conversation that is boring, or disagreeable, or whatever. You do not have to answer stupid questions. You do not have to explain what you are going to do; you just let things explain themselves. Such as fixing a lock - you just fix it and that is all the explanation needed. If you answer the telephone to a tele-marketer, or anyone trying to flog something, they hang up on you without you having to make the effort to end the call in an educated fashion. It is short compensation but it is something. And I entertain the hope that, one day, I will recover the capacity to speak without pain and with sufficient clarity to be understood on first utterance.