Anna Balint and Mark S. Courey, MD, after her successful surgery
In August 2015, Anna Balint fell in her New Jersey home and sustained a neck fracture. Then, during reparative surgery at a local hospital, the anesthesiologist damaged Mrs. Balint’s voice box, which left her near death.
“I turned blue from lack of oxygen,” she says, reflecting on her ordeal. Fortunately, another physician in the room was able to perform an emergency tracheostomy and saved her life. In rescuing Mrs. Balint, however, the physician damaged her larynx and left her unable to speak.
An ear, nose and throat specialist, whom she later consulted in New Jersey, told Mrs. Balint that he would not be able to restore her voice—confirming her worst fears. But he did provide a silver lining: he recommended that she see Mark S. Courey, MD, Division Chief of Laryngology and Director of the Grabscheid Voice and Swallowing Center of Mount Sinai. That set her on the path to healing.
Dr. Courey scoped Mrs. Balint’s throat and found complicated damage to the airway. He said he could bring her voice back with additional surgery to her larynx and trachea, although he could not guarantee that she would regain her pre-injury tone. To Mrs. Balint, who had once prided herself on having a lovely singing voice and enjoyed singing in church, that was a small price to pay, because at this point, the only way she could communicate was by writing her thoughts down on paper.
A six-hour operation to repair her voice box soon followed. During the surgery, Dr. Courey fixed a complex airway narrowing, performed a resection of Mrs. Balint’s trachea, and created a new tracheotomy. Although she remained in the hospital for five days following the surgery and was connected to a ventilator, Mrs. Balint noticed immediate results.
“As soon as I was out of surgery, I started to speak,” she says. “I did not have to write down everything. I was so happy! Can you imagine how many months I had to go through writing everything down before my operation with Dr. Courey?”
At first, Mrs. Balint saw Dr. Courey every two to three weeks so he could check on the progression of her healing. The ventilator made sleeping at night particularly uncomfortable. But, approximately one year after her ordeal began, Dr. Courey removed her from the machine and Mrs. Balint says she finally felt “free. Dr. Courey held my hand and said, ‘Everything is going to be all right.’ ”
Mrs. Balint says, “I still have a small hole in my neck. If I talk too much I have to assist my voice with my stomach, but I have no machine. Every day I think about Dr. Courey. Nobody else knew how to correct my voice, only he did. I would recommend him to everybody. In fact, I have already recommended two friends to see him. I am alive and can speak to my husband and grandchildren, I am very happy.”