Delta Goodrem Paralyzed: the terrifying year I lost my voice
The singer spent a year relearning how to speak after surgical complications paralysed a nerve in her tongue.
Award-winning Sydney pop singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem has revealed that a surgical mishap in October 2018 dramatically affected her ability to speak and robbed the award-winning musician of her singing voice for a full year.
Complications after the removal of Goodrem’s salivary gland led to the paralysis of a nerve in her tongue, which meant that she was unable to control her speech.
“This is f..ked — I don’t want to go out, I’m super embarrassed,” said Goodrem soon after the surgery. “I’m just over it. Just trying to stay positive. My livelihood is my sound. I’m trying to decide whether this is getting any better or not. It doesn’t feel like it.”
In a six-minute video posted online on Sunday night, the 35-year-old details how she went into months of rehabilitation with daily speech therapy.
Clips that Goodrem made of herself show her slurring her speech significantly in the early days before gradually improving as a result of the exhaustive speech exercise regimen.
“This is bizarre,” she says in a later clip. “It just gets really tiring, trying to get your brain to talk to your tongue.”
Her fifth album Wings of the Wild was released in 2016, but the surgery mishap set back her plans to record and release new music. Across the course of a year, she was able to treat the problem through therapy and relearn how to speak and sing, an experience she captured in her newest single Paralyzed.
In its opening verse, she sings, “Doctor paused this life / He told me, ‘You won’t fly / Cancel everything / You need some time to heal / And it may take a year’ / Reset the clocks again / Is this the way life goes?”
To conclude the video explaining the recent events that she had kept private, Goodrem wrote, “My deepest love and respect for my doctor and to all the doctors and nurses at St Vincent’s [Hospital Sydney]. We are all behind you and all healthcare workers everywhere in the current fight.”
While in recovery, Goodrem wrote her upcoming sixth album, Bridge Over Troubled Dreams. This is not the first time that a health challenge has spurred her creativity: she wrote her second album, 2004’s Mistaken Identity, while undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer.
Since signing a record deal with Sony at 15, Goodrem has spent much of the past two decades in the public eye, first as a popular singer-songwriter — her 2003 debut album, Innocent Eyes, spent 29 weeks in the No 1 spot on the ARIA chart, a record she still holds — and as a coach on the television program The Voice Australia, on which she first appeared in 2012.
Next year, Goodrem will undertake a national tour that begins in Brisbane on April 8 and ends in Melbourne on May 2. One dollar from each ticket will be donated to her registered charity, the Delta Goodrem Foundation, in partnership with St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, to help fund medical research into blood cancers and auto-immune disease.
In a note to fans published alongside the video on Sunday, Goodrem wrote, “You never know what someone is going through and this is an extremely hard time for people. So I send this story to you with the message of hope and love.”
“Getting through the tough times is hard,” she wrote, before going on to quote the final lyrics to Paralyzed: “With a little time and a little hope, with a little light you never know. For a little space, for a lot of love, close your eyes and think of a better time, big dreams; open your mind for you to find a little strength inside. Stop and rewind”.
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