Ow

We had choir rehearsal last night. My voice still hurts.

Bums me out a lot.

I had been doing vocal exercises every day -- every single day -- for a while. I had a CD, and I would do the short exercises (8 minutes or so) in the car during the ride to work. I would do the whole magilla (45 minutes) on the ride home. I did this every work day; and on Saturday and Sunday I would still do the short exercise program.

All to try to regain a bit of my range; and (more importantly) to make my voice stop hurting so much when I sing.

Well, the Subaru (the car with the CD player) had axle problems (which I have yet to fix), so I started driving the Taurus....so I quit doing the exercises for about a month. I finally put the exercises on a cassette, so I could do 'em in the Taurus, too, and I've been real diligent about doing them for the last couple of weeks.

But my voice hurts. Hurts a lot. Sometimes, after only about 5 minutes of singing, it feels like a (bad!) muscle cramp across my whole throat and voice box....and sometimes, after spending time in the upper register, it can feel like it's being stabbed with a hot poker....and that feeling can last.

Like now. My voice is in great pain this morning -- fully 12 hours after I stopped singing.

What's worse is that a) I still don't sound good, and b) the "upper range" that hurts is now anything above an E...I used to be able to sing a Bflat without pain. Now I can't even sing it, and an F hurts like a mother.

I know I've said this before, but I still can't quite reconcile with it. I do so very few things well, and one of the few things I honestly thought I did okay was singing. Now, not so much. That hurts me emotionally just as much as the voice box hurts me physically.

*Sigh*