Word: throat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Alien and Prophecy have a common failing: they are scared stiff of stillness. There are no intentional laughs in either movie,and nobody smiles. The actors are too busy being realistic. And finally, the atmosphere of each becomes oppressive: the popcorn gets stuck in your throat. Existentially, Alien is more of a downer than Waiting for Godot. Beckett pins some hopes on the human spirit and personality; Alien presents people as walking red meat and pus for greedy lobsters...
...Americans a year who develop cancer of the voice box, or larynx. To remove the cancerous tissue, surgeons perform an operation called a laryngectomy on many of these patients. Because the surgery disrupts the windpipe, the surgeon must create a small hole in the throat for breathing. But talking is another matter. Some people can learn to gulp air through the mouth, force it down the esophagus, or gullet, instead of the windpipe, and literally burp it back up into a cavity called the pharynx, where a rough facsimile of the natural voice is produced. But like all too many...
Today not only can Parello talk again, but her speech is astonishingly understandable. What has given Parello and hundreds of other victims of throat cancer in the U.S. and Europe new voices is an ingenious operation developed by an Italian surgeon...
...windpipe, causing choking. In 1969 Dr. Mario Staffieri of Piacenza, near Milan, Italy, tried a new approach, inspired by a famous case in medical annals. Forty years earlier, a Chicago iceman, suicidally depressed by the loss of his voice after a laryngectomy, had plunged an ice pick into his throat. Instead of dying, he regained the ability to speak; he had accidentally pierced the esophagus wall in a way that gave him a voice again...
...much attention in the U.S., partly because American specialists did not know much about it. But in 1976, at the urging of U.S. Air Force Surgeon Frederick McConnel, who had seen Staffieri's work, Northwestern University's Dr. George Sisson tried the operation on a throat cancer patient deeply depressed at the prospect of losing her voice. The results were remarkable, as were those of another early patient, Bessie Parello, who could speak 20 minutes at a time two weeks after her operation. Since then at least 75 people in Chicago, Atlanta and Galveston have undergone such surgery...