Post-Covid tracheal resection – first case in India

Prolonged intubations result in tracheal damage and stenosis, the treatment for severe cases is resection and anastomosis. With the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic, this incidence kept rising but the timing and precautions for such aerosolising surgeries remained unclear. To report the first case of tracheal resection and anastomosis in India done during the Covid-19 pandemic along with its rationale. We report a case of 30/male with prolonged intubation and tracheostomy done for Covid-19 pneumonia and ARDS with failure to decannulate and complete loss of voice. After thorough preoperative work-up, he underwent tracheal resection of 4 rings with cricotracheal anastomosis during the covid-19 pandemic in October 2020. He was extubated on table and was asymptomatic after 3 months of follow-up with excellent voice. With good team effort and appropriate precautions, aerosolising airway surgeries resection anastomosis can be safely performed.

Book Review: Recovering the Voice in Our Techno-Social World: On the Phone

Recovering the Voice in Our Techno-Social World: On the Phone serves as an exemplar and timely work that calls attention to several consequences of our techno-social world, most notably, the loss of voice. Eicher-Catt argues that the field of human communication study is largely preoccupied with the textual and visual realms of communication, and thereby neglects the vibrant medium of the voice. Upon review, Recovering the Voice proves to be an innovative and detailed call of attention to the auditory, sonorous voice in a world of technology, new media, and cyberspace. The book’s clear and persuasive exigency points to a re-enchantment with the voice in a world that seems to be becoming more and more voiceless.

Home is where the kitchen is: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018)1

The kitchen has become a prominent trope in East Asian cinema, the narratives of which revolve around the homecoming of female protagonists: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018). In part due to the fact that the films are adaptations of different media – novel and manga, respectively – and in part motivated by their narrative and style – the female protagonist’s loss of voice in Rinco’s Restaurant and the less frequent recourse to the verbal to express taste in these works – the audience is challenged to imagine the taste of, and pleasure in consuming, food, conveyed through only a limited set of sensorial modes. I focus on the transformative aspect of divergent modes of media storytelling in these films and their original source texts, and further argue that the kitchen becomes a ‘choric’ space for female protagonists where the relationship between mother and daughter is reconfigured in order to reinvent themselves.

Voice Control

Chapter 7 discusses gendered political and personal implications of voice loss. It examines the loss of voice through and mediated by technology. First, it traces a history in American cinema and the shifting sociopolitical landscapes in which it has projected its visions and auditions, where the transformation of voices—especially women’s— can be heard clearly. The singing voice in cinema has moved from symbolizing the vulnerability of identity and its susceptibility to manipulation, to embodying the affirmation of identity as a site of individual agency. Outside of cinema, voice loss in singers is subject to discourses no less suffused with ideas about identity and agency. Second, the chapter explores the loss of voice that one singer experienced by selling her voice to a digital sampling library.

A phenomenology of ‘blending in’: Beyond emotional regulation

The phenomenon of devaluing of self for adolescent girls has been highlighted in previous qualitative research in a US cultural context. Carol Gilligan and her colleagues have documented a loss of connection to self and loss of voice. ‘Blending in’ pertains to such a loss of connection and voice. ‘Blending in’ emerges from many aspects of 8 Irish females’ retrospective qualitative phenomenological accounts of their adolescent experiences. These features of blending in include: a dumbing down of intellectual ability in order to fit in, a desire to be hidden in the group to ‘fade into the background’, to not stand out as being different, fear of being labelled by others and fear of challenging others. Blending in gives phenomenological support to Gilligan’s (1990) accounts of silencing and loss of relation to self in adolescent girls, to a rendering of self as other. This phenomenological exploration is resonant also with de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and to a loss of capacity for introversion in Western culture, echoing Jung (1921). Blending in requires firmer addressing in social and emotional education (SEE), especially regarding challenge to self-management as emotional impulse and behaviour regulation. Self-management as blending in risks being a process of loss of voice and alienation of self.