'The Voice' — Illness hasn't hushed attorney's humor

Before cancer, Rod liked to sing in the shower and in the car. After, he used the time at stop lights to "think a lot," until the day he wasn't paying attention and caused a fender-bender. Now he thinks about traffic when he's in the car, and the shower is one of his favorite places for reflection.

"When you are limited in speech, you have little choice but to think more. That has been a good thing," he says in one of several chatty e-mails to a reporter. His ability to analyze has improved, as well. That happens, he notes, when you do a lot of your communicating on a computer screen. Or when you must choose words carefully and use them sparingly.

Through it all, he prayed, something "most litigators don't like to say they do," as he writes in another. "When the staff at the O.R. at LDS in operating room 20 know you on a first-name basis because you've been there so many times — 'Hi, Rod! You back again?' — you know you might be in trouble. When you have learned most of the names of the anesthesiologists who work O.R. 20 and have learned which drugs will leave you feeling the best after the procedure and can ask for them by name, you should know you are in trouble. Some of my loneliest moments happened while waiting in a special room, on the gurney, for O.R. 20 to open up so they could start on me."

His prayers were sometimes answered in that room, but not always the way he wanted.

What were at the time huge disappointments have now, given time and a broader perspective, become part of his humorous, self-deprecating patter. Told he'd have a different voice after the surgery, he quips that he hoped for Frank Sinatra's, but got Louis Armstrong's.

He peppers a conversation with funny observations. He can drink and eat at the same time. "You can't," he teases. But he can't go swimming, because he'd drown. He has an opening at the base of his throat, called a stoma, through which he breathes. Water would pour straight into his lungs. Still, he doesn't get colds or hay fever anymore, since air no longer passes through his nose.

As he recovered, he was surprised to find most women were very accepting and could also read his lips. The exception, he jokes, were his wife and secretary.

Heather Dove was Rod's speech pathologist, charged with teaching "the voice" how to speak without one. A human voice, she says, is a wonder, full of color and nuance. Living without one is a major adjustment.

When your larynx is removed, you have some options, but "nowhere near" what nature provided, says Dove, who retired from speech pathology and now enjoys a second career managing financial accounts.