Word: parello
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...Bessie Parello, then 47, became one of the 10,000 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...
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...
...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...