PUBLIC NOTICE

THE QUIETEST AUCTIONEER IN KANSAS
Col. Bob Fountain, Auctioneer (retired, mostly)

WILL OFFER THE FOLLOWING, TO ANYBODY WHO'LL LISTEN:
Forty years of cattle sales · one voice box (already gone) · three ways to talk without one · good advice, slightly used

LOCATION: Western Kansas, on the Internet  ·  SALE TIME: Whenever you get here
TERMS: Free. Not responsible for accidents.

Name's Bob Fountain. Sixty-five years old. For forty years, 1956 to 1996, I called the cattle sale every Tuesday at the Hackberry Livestock Auction out here in western Kansas. Feeders, fats, cows, pairs, bulls, the old horse now and then. Forty years. Never missed a Tuesday but two, and one of those was the day our first boy was born, and Nelda still says I looked at my watch.

You want to know what a Tuesday sounded like? It sounded like me. Seven hours of chant, a thousand head on a good day, hollering at the ring men, kidding the buyers, getting the bid. Who'll give me sixty, sixty, now sixty-one, sixty-one, sixty-one, now two. That voice put three kids through school.

Now I sound like a talking electric razor. Let me tell you how that happened, and what I've learned, and what I'd like my neighbors to know.

I smoked forty-five years. Started at sixteen behind the barn. Quit the day they told me. That's the short version and the one that matters.

Long version. In the summer of '95 I got hoarse and stayed hoarse. Figured it was the chant. Auctioneers get hoarse, everybody knows that. Hot tea and honey. Didn't help. Got worse. By fall I was losing my voice by the middle of the sale.

Nelda made me an appointment. Twice. I canceled it twice. The third time she drove me herself. The doctor in town sent me to a throat specialist in Wichita, Dr. Calderon, and he found cancer of the larynx. That's the voice box. Too far along to save it.

Early in 1996 he took it out. Total laryngectomy, they call it. I'll spare you the hospital. It's a hospital. They're good people and the Jell-O is the same color everywhere.

I called my last sale the Tuesday before the surgery. Didn't tell the crowd. Told the ring men. They knew anyhow. At the end, old buyers I'd kidded for thirty years came down and shook my hand and didn't say much, which for cattle buyers is a speech.

Your voice box, the larynx, sits at the top of your windpipe. It makes your voice, and it's also the doorway between your breathing and your swallowing.

In a total laryngectomy, they take the whole voice box out. Then they bring the top of the windpipe out to a round opening in the front of the neck, down low. That opening is called a stoma. From then on you breathe in and out through the stoma, not your nose and mouth. Your nose and mouth aren't hooked up to your lungs anymore. You still eat and drink through your mouth, same as always.

That makes you a neck breather. There's a good many of us around the country, and we all learn some of the same things:

• You can't talk the old way. No voice box, no voice. (See Lot 4.)
• Your sense of smell isn't what it was, because air doesn't go through your nose anymore. After forty years in sale barns, some folks say that's no loss.
• You can't blow your nose, sniff, or whistle. You can still laugh. Mine's mostly air now.
• Water in the stoma goes right to your lungs. That means no swimming, ever, and you are careful in the shower and careful near a stock tank.

1. The electrolarynx. A battery-powered gadget about the size of a flashlight. You hold it against your neck or under your chin and push the button, and it buzzes, and the buzz goes up into your mouth, and you shape the words with your mouth and tongue like always. It sounds like a robot with a sore throat. I learned it in a couple of weeks. It's what I use most. Nelda says I talk just as much as ever, only now you can hear me coming.

2. Esophageal speech. No gadget at all. You learn to take a little air into the top of your esophagus, that's your food pipe, and let it back out slow and steady, and shape that into words. Kind of a controlled burp, if you want the honest truth. It takes months to learn and some folks never get it. The ones who do sound real natural. I'm working on it with my speech therapist, Kathleen, every other Thursday. Right now I'm good for short sentences: "Morning." "Pass the salt." "Nelda, I'm right." She says I'm coming along. She's a patient woman, and she'd better be.

3. A voice prosthesis. This one's a surgery. The doctor makes a small opening between the windpipe and the food pipe and puts in a little one-way valve, the prosthesis. When you want to talk, you cover the stoma with your thumb, and the air from your lungs goes through the valve into your food pipe and comes out as a voice. A real voice, made with your own lungs. People who have them sound a lot like their old selves. It takes some care and some doctor visits. I'm talking it over with Dr. Calderon now to see whether I'm a good candidate. If I go for it, you'll read about it here first.

Whichever way you talk, the main thing is that you do talk. Some folks after this surgery just quit. Stop going to town. Stop going to church. Don't let that be you. People will wait for you. Most of them, anyway.

• Shower guard. A little shield that goes over the stoma so the water runs off it. Don't shower without it.
• Humidity. Your nose used to warm the air and wet it down before it got to your lungs. Now the air goes straight in. In a Kansas winter, with the furnace running, that's dry as a feed sack. I wear a foam filter over the stoma, run a humidifier by the bed at night, and drink a lot of water.
• Cover it up. A cover keeps out dust, chaff and bugs, and keeps folks from staring. Some of the fellas wear an ascot. I wear a bandana, like a cowboy, which suits me.
• Medical ID. Bracelet on my wrist, card in my wallet, sticker on the pickup window. Says NECK BREATHER. If I'm ever in a wreck, I want the rescue squad to know where my airway is. More on that on the page for rescue workers.
• The telephone. I use the buzzer on the phone. Folks who don't know me hang up. Folks who do know me wait. I've learned who my friends are that way.

Cancer of the larynx is mostly a smoker's cancer. I'm not going to preach. I smoked forty-five years and you couldn't have told me a thing. But I'll say this once, plain as I can buzz it: smoking took my voice. It took my living. If you smoke, quit. If you can't quit by yourself, there's no shame in that, your doctor can help, and there's the patch and the gum and the rest of it. If you've been hoarse for more than a few weeks, go get it looked at. Don't be me and cancel twice.

Going on four years now without a cigarette. I still dream about them. In the dream I can talk.

Before my surgery, a lady named Hazel Ullman came to see me in the hospital. She's 75 years old and she's been a neck breather since 1979, and she talks with esophageal speech better than I ever talked with a voice box. She sat by my bed and told me exactly what was coming, and then she told me a joke, and I knew I'd be all right. I still don't know how she knew I needed the joke.

Hazel's the reason I joined our local laryngectomee club, the Wheat Belt Talkers. We meet the third Tuesday of the month in Hays, in a church fellowship hall, a dozen or so of us and our wives and husbands. Folks drive a long way for it. We trade tips on filters and shower guards and batteries, we practice talking, we eat pie, and some of us go visit the new ones in the hospital, the way Hazel visited me. Vincent's been a neck breather longer than anybody in the club and runs the meetings. Rhoda brings the pie. Marguerite, a retired nurse in our group, taught our county rescue squad about neck breathers last spring.

Clubs like ours all over the country belong to the International Association of Laryngectomees, the IAL, which brings the clubs together, helps people learn to talk again, and holds a meeting every year. The American Cancer Society has been a friend to laryngectomee clubs for a long time, and your local ACS office can tell you if there's a club near you, and maybe send a visitor like Hazel. Look them up in the phone book.

You folks have been good to me. A few things that help:

• Give me a minute. I'll get there.
• Don't finish my sentences. I might've been fixing to say something smarter than what you guessed. Doubtful, but possible.
• Don't holler. I'm not deaf. I just can't holler back.
• It's fine to say "say that again." I'd rather say it twice than have you nod and walk off.
• Look at me, not my neck.
• If something ever happens to me, or to any neck breather, read the rescue page. It could save a life.

Young Al Parra calls the Tuesday sale now. Good kid. Good chant. Not as good as mine. I sit up in the top row of the sale barn most Tuesdays and watch, and when he gets a good bid out of a tight buyer, I buzz "SOLD" right along with him. The regulars all turn around and grin.

This is Nelda. Bob is going to complain that I put this in. I just want to say that the doctors took his voice box and they did not take one single thing that matters about him. He is still the funniest man in three counties. He still talks too much. I wouldn't have it any other way. Forty-two years in December. — N.F.

SOLD!
Thank you for coming. Write the auctioneer:
[email protected]
(I answer every one. Typing, it turns out, I can do just fine.)

BIDDERS REGISTERED SINCE 1998:


Sale bill last updated Tuesday, September 14, 1999, a sale day.
Col. Bob Fountain is an auctioneer, not a doctor. Talk to yours.
Lunch on the grounds. Not responsible for accidents.