Left with a whispering voice, this teacher still makes herself heard

There are some voices that stay with you forever.

Christy Ann Conlin is a writer from Nova Scotia. More than a dozen years ago, she met a teacher in her neighbourhood named Joceline Doucette.

Doucette had a condition called tracheal stenosis. "My simplified understanding of this is that she has a benign growth in her throat that keeps reoccuring and the only way to remove the growth is to actually take a piece of the trachea out," Conlin said. 
 
Doucette had been dealing with tracheal stenosis for most of her adult life and at the time had gone through more than two dozen surgeries to treat the condition. All of these procedures gradually changed the quality of her voice and eventually left her with a whispering voice. 
 
Conlin forged a fast friendship with Doucette when she began a conversation with her at a local event. "I had to put my ear almost on her lips so I could hear her talk and so it was sort of an intimate start to a friendship," Conlin remembered.

Eventually Conlin wanted to share her friend's story and her voice and with others. In 2008, she pitched a story to the CBC Radio program Outfront, that featured stories drawn from real life. 
 
The resulting documentary, My Whispering Friend, focused on Doucette's experience with tracheal stenosis and profiled her life at home with her husband and four children. 
 
In addition to making communication more difficult for Doucette, tracheal stenosis also causes very serious issues with her breathing, with any continuous exertion compromising her breath. 
 
"There's a lot of times I don't say what I want to say because it's too much effort to speak it. So a lot of things go unsaid," Doucette explained. 
 
Today, Conlin is still friends with Doucette and recently she visited Doucette's home to do an update on her story for The Doc Project. 

After so many surgeries, Doucette now requires injections to one of her vocal cords once or twice a year to maintain the voice she has left. "I like to call it botoxing my vocal cord. It's not Botox but it is a liquid that they inject to plump up the vocal cord that is not working," she explained.  
 
While Doucette wanted to return to teaching full time she was unable to do so. She said her doctors told her, "You have to stop using your voice or in five years time you just won't have a voice left for your family."  
 
Doucette now spends a lot of her time at home focusing on that family.

 
"I am really lucky that I've got four really respectful engaged boys that help out,  that understand my situation, that will step in where they know I can't do something," she said. "And Martin (her husband) is great that way too. To him, I'm no different than I ever was."

While not returning to teaching was a "bitter pill to swallow" for Doucette, she said she now spends time doing quiet artistic activities like printmaking, pottery and weaving. 

"So I'm being artistic and creative in a different way rather than through teaching and being creative in how I teach," Doucette said, "Essentially life is good."