Man gets his voice back through rare operation

A man from Massachusetts gets his voice back.

After the third larynx transplant ever – and the first in a patient with active cancer – performed in the USA in February, Marty Kedian can speak again, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The 21-hour procedure, performed by a six-person surgical team from the Mayo Clinic’s Laryngeal and Tracheal Transplant Program in Arizona and part of a clinical trial, enabled 59-year-old Kedian to fulfill his dream of being able to speak to his granddaughter using his own voice.

Before the groundbreaking procedure – which, according to the Mayo Clinic, had only been performed “a handful of times” worldwide – Kedian said he was “alive, but I was no longer alive.”

Because of his cancer – a rare form of throat cancer called chondrosarcoma – he had a tracheostomy several years ago that allowed him to breathe through a hole in his throat. Combined with the loss of his voice, the procedure led to an isolated life, he told the Mayo Clinic.

“I would love to talk to people everywhere I go, but I just couldn’t,” he said. “I felt weird and didn’t want to go anywhere.”

Kedian was also told by doctors that his only option for recovery, given the ongoing disease, was to have his larynx completely removed – but he refused. “I didn’t want a laryngectomy. I wanted to find a way to get my quality of life back,” he told the Mayo Clinic.

“I wanted this so I could speak and breathe normally with my new granddaughter,” he added of the clinical trial. “I want to read her bedtime stories in my own voice.”

The Massachusetts-born doctor’s search took him thousands of miles from home to the Larynx and Trachea Transplant Program on the Mayo Clinic campus in Arizona, where Dr. David Lott was leading a clinical trial on laryngeal transplantation.

The team removed Kedian’s cancerous larynx and replaced it with a donated one on Feb. 29, the Mayo Clinic reports. Since then, he has regained about 60 percent of his voice – a feat that Dr. Lott thought would take “at least a year.”

In addition, Kedian “still speaks with the same voice and Boston accent he had before cancer,” the doctor added.

As soon as he could, Kedian used his recovered voice to talk to his 82-year-old mother, an experience he recounted to The Associated Press. “Talking to my mother was important to me,” he said.

Four months have passed since the procedure and, according to Dr. Lott, Kedian’s breathing is steadily improving. When he can breathe completely on his own again, his tracheostomy tube will be removed – and he can’t wait.

“Every day it gets better,” Kedian said, adding that he is “pushing myself to make it go faster because I want to get these tubes out and live a normal life again.”

The surgical team that performed the operation “gave me my life back,” Kedian told the Mayo Clinic.

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“I am so grateful,” he said. “I am deeply grateful to Dr. Lott’s team and especially to the generosity of my organ donor and his family. I hope one day I will have the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to them.”

Kedian’s experience also gives hope to other people who can no longer speak, swallow and breathe independently due to throat cancer, as the program will perform more transplants in the coming years.

“People need to keep their voice,” Kedian told AP. “I want people to know that this is possible.”