A PRICELESS GIFT

A PRICELESS GIFT

After four years of struggle with sound, Matt Mitchell speaks

Hunter Jones

In the months of November and December, the holidays surrounding the two typically bring out the feeling of being thankful for what you have and grateful for what you receive. Over the past four years, Jackson County Assistant District Attorney Matt Mitchell has grown to be thankful for sound. This holiday season, he is grateful for his voice.

At the Drug Court graduation in November, many in First Baptist Church celebrated the freedom from addiction for themselves and their loved ones as they graduated from drug court. However, in the midst of that celebration, Judge John Graham decides to share more good news. He calls Jackson County Assistant District Attorney and Drug Court Prosecutor Matt Mitchell to read the names of the graduates. Graham reveals that Mitchell had not been able to speak for over four years due to the effects of long COVID. 

In the Fall of 2020, Mitchell had his first bout with COVID. After being quarantined for the two weeks, he still had a hard time getting over it, still feeling weak and seemingly staying sick, with pneumonia, flu and then strep throat soon after. In February of 2021, Mitchell caught COVID a second time. One morning, he woke up and was completely mute, unable to make a sound.

At first, Mitchell did not think much of it. He had been sick before and his voice was rough afterwards, however a week passed and he still cannot produce sound. At this point, it is beginning to scare him, so he goes to the doctor, is sent to the EMT and prescribed antibiotics. The antibiotics seemed to do nothing to help.

Mitchell’s friend, Spencer Free, told him that he had a connection to the Vanderbilt Medical Center. Through this connection, Mitchell was able to get an appointment at the Vanderbilt Voice Center, where they took a scope of his vocal cords and diagnosed him with muscle tension dysphonia, essentially telling him that the muscles around his voice box had been through a lot of trauma, tightened and would not loosen.

From there, Mitchell would go to Vanderbilt once a week for speech therapy and physical therapy for the muscles.

Without his voice, Mitchell had to communicate in a different way, often through notes. For the first two months, one way he would try to get the attention of his kids was snapping his fingers. However, he noticed that when he would snap his fingers, his boys would get upset, sometimes even crying.

“One day, my wife and I were talking about it and she said ‘you do realize that whenever they do something, if you got onto them before you lost your voice, you would snap when you said their name,” Mitchell said. “At that point, I realized that they associate me snapping my fingers with them being in trouble. I had to take a step back and really think about communication. It broke my heart to think that my kids for the last two months thought I was getting onto them when I just wanted to get their attention, try to find out how their day went or give them a hug.”

On top of that, Mitchell also had to figure out how to do his job without the ability to speak, a key piece to most jobs for communication. Mitchell’s inability to speak limited his communication with his co-workers, forcing him to improve in a variety of ways to better perform his job with his disability. He began taking better notes, trying to better pick out important information for a case to discuss with his colleagues. During trials, he also had to swap roles, moving to more of a background spot, ensuring pretrial motions were filed and ensuring they had the right research. While working cases, he also began to pay more attention to not just what information was conveyed by each side but how it was received.

From the start, the District Attorney’s Office was helpful to Mitchell, keeping him on and helping him when he needed it. While Mitchell tried to help in every way he can to make up for his predicament, he spoke to Jackson County District Attorney Jason Pierce multiple times about his issues, saying that being an attorney that can’t speak, he would understand if he needed to be let go.

“(Pierce) said ‘absolutely not, this is not something you went out and did, this is something that unfortunately happened to you. We are a family and we’re not turning our back on you,’” Mitchell said. “I couldn’t ask for a better boss than Jason and better colleagues than what we have in this office.”

Over time, Mitchell was able to develop a whisper through the therapy sessions, allowing him to verbally communicate with others, however it was still faint and not a satisfying permanent option for Mitchell. After nearly two years of doing the same thing with little to show, Mitchell decided it was time to move to a different medical center and try something new. He wound up moving to a doctor in Atlanta, who he saw for a year. Throughout that year, they would do injections into his neck muscles when he would visit once every two months. The injections were to try and break loose the tension and get some relief in those muscles, with 40 to 50 shots between different areas per visit.

“Between those, blood draws and IVs, I’ve been stuck well over 1,000 times over the past four years,” Mitchell said.

One day, someone the Mitchell family knew saw a doctor at Huntsville ENT and had a surgery done on her throat and vocal cords. After this procedure, they were able to get some of their sound back. They called and told Mitchell what they did and Mitchell immediately messaged his doctor about a referral for this particular doctor.

Mitchell met with the doctor in Huntsville, they ran a scope where the doctor diagnosed the vocal cords as partially paralyzed. Unlike when Mitchell first went to Vanderbilt and the vocal cords had no movement whatsoever, they would try to move now, however could not close in order to produce sound.

The doctor then proposed a surgery to essentially move the vocal cords closer together, reducing the work needed to close and produce sound. While the doctor was willing to go through with the surgery, he did inform Mitchell that it was about a 50% chance that he would get sound back or that he could lose what little sound he has if there is any change at all. 

“My position on it was that I’ve been driving all over the Southeast for the last three, almost four years. My son Sawyer was diagnosed with autism when he was three. The doctors told us that he would probably never talk and we would have to take care of him. By the time that boy was six, he talked more than I did. My position was always that my son set the example. It doesn’t matter what they say, you keep on working and the Lord has a plan,” Mitchell said. “If I lose what I got, that’s fine, I’m not going to stop fighting, let’s do it.”

The surgery was done in September and Mitchell was told that it would take about a month or more for everything to settle and heal. After that, he was set up with their speech therapist. While they had many similar exercises that Mitchell had gone through before, they also encouraged him to bend differently, left, right, lean, to try and flex different muscles and see if something clicked.

One night, Mitchell was sitting at home, doing those same exercises, trying different things and finally, Mitchell produced sound.

“Honestly, at first I was shocked. I was thinking ‘what in the world was that’ and then I realized that was me making sound. How did I do that? I had to spend about two days going back through the process where I would do something, try it and if it didn’t work, write it down and put ‘no’. Finally, it did work and once that happened, I knew what to do,” Mitchell said.

After that, it was about replicating what he was doing. Fortunately, Mitchell had a post operation appointment coming up, so he decided to hide that he could talk in order to first make sure that it was sustainable and not a fluke.

“I would have right at three days by the time I went for my post op. If I can get three days of this, then I can go there and show them and see what they say. I was able to get the three consecutive days, went to the post op, they ran the scope,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell describes his new way of talking as keeping his neck tensed in order to constrict the flexed muscles. Then, similar to how singers often talk about singing with their diaphragm, he flexes his gut to ‘push up’ with the neck tensed. As Mitchell sits there with the camera down his throat, they see that while his vocal cords could not get all the way there, they were close enough to make sound.

“So I say that I’m learning to talk again but the doctor says ‘no, think about it like this. You’re not learning to talk, you can talk, it just comes out in a whisper. You’re learning to talk in a whole new way. You have to make this become second nature. You have to practice it, get up and find it every morning. The more you do it, the easier it is going to become,’” Mitchell said. 

The doctor told Mitchell that he doesn’t believe this manner of speaking will have any issues aside from Mitchell having to make this new way of speech second nature.

With this news, Mitchell goes home and gathers his family around to speak to them for the first time in four years. Mitchell talks about his four-year-old daughter, who was only eight months old when he initially lost his voice.

Mitchell describes his new voice as ‘not quite Billy Bob Thorton from Slingblade’, with that gravely sound. When his family first heard it, emotions were all over the place. His wife cried, thankful that the day they prayed over for four years has finally come to pass. His twin sons shouted excitedly, happy to see their dad regain his voice. His daughter laughs, thinking that her dad is playing a joke and talking funny. When Mitchell explains that it is not a joke and that this is how he speaks now, her tone shifts.

“That sounds a little scarier than you usually talk, daddy,” she said.

Mitchell jokes that this is a reminder for her to mind her parents so he does not have to use the scary voice. 

Since then, Mitchell has noticed that his daughter comes to him more often to talk or play, being amazed by how much better they communicate now vs when he could only have that small whisper.

Now, Mitchell waits excitedly for his kids to play sports, finally being able to properly cheer them on where they can hear it. Another thing Mitchell has found a lot of joy in is being able to sing, recalling his wife needing something from the store the night after Mitchell recovered his sound, going by himself and singing along all the way to the store and back.

Every morning, Mitchell still has to find his voice, stretching out, every now and then still only producing that small whisper for a while. However, eventually, he finds his voice. Now with it, he thanks the many people who have offered up the many prayers up for him through these years. He thanks his family for their support throughout these times, his coworkers for their trust and patience in him while he was fighting this battle and the many strangers he has never met but have prayed for his recovery.

Over these trying four years, Mitchell has certainly learned to listen, whether by force or by choice.  Through this long trial in his life, Mitchell has learned to be thankful for a gift many would typically take for granted.

“I try to remember the lessons that I learned over the last four years. The lessons of patience, the lessons of being grateful, the lessons of it’s not about me, it’s about the people and how can I serve them. The way to do that is not by hearing my own voice but listening to others,” Mitchell said. “Sometimes, it is simply listening and not saying a word. Sometimes, somebody just needs to be heard. Before all of this happened, I will be the first to tell you that I was always trying to put my two cents in. Now, it is just as simple as listening to somebody tell you what is happening and them knowing that you are listening. Sometimes, that is enough, just knowing that somebody is there.”

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