Grant Hasse was born with a malformed windpipe that could have killed him a birth. In addition to being completely blocked, he had no vocal apparatus. He had been born without vocal cords or a voice box (larynx).
But he is now almost 4 years old and is a healthy boy. Among the many surgeries he has undergone is a new procedure to create vocal cords.
Before he was born, it was discovered that Grant's upper airway did not connect to his lungs. Ultrasound images showed that there was cartilage blocking the airway. Even with quick surgical intervention right at his birth, his survival chances were extremely slim. Only about 50 people born with the condition worldwide have survived.
Grant's lungs were filling up with fluid and he was delivered via cesarean section, when he weighed less than 3 pounds, at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. Before he was pulled completely from the womb, a surgeon inserted a breathing tube into his trachea so that air could reach his lungs. He was immediately connected to a breathing machine and spent 4 months in the hospital before he went home with a ventilator
When Grant was around 1, doctors discovered he had an undeveloped voice box and no vocal cords.
Dr. Glenn Green, who had performed the emergency surgery when Grant was born, had reconstructed airways in premature babies whose voice boxes were damaged from breathing tubes. He believed it was possible to completely build a voice box and vocal cords for Grant, using the boy's own tissue. He created two cord-like structures from nearby muscle, and then used a bone graft from Grant's rib to separate them. This allowed them to vibrate to create sound the way normal vocal cords do.
With speech therapy, Grant has learned how to form his lips and make puffs of air to create sounds, including "h'' and "p." Now he can say more than a dozen words, including "mama" and ''dada." Green and Grant's parents think Grant will learn to become fully vocal, though his voice probably will always sound raspy.
