It’s day 16 of silent treatment to rest my voice due to vocal nodules. I sure hope that those little throat calluses are healing because at 16 days in, this is certainly feeling like a big commitment!

I had an awkward incident this morning that’s worth noting. I went for a swim at the St. Catharines YMCA on my lunch break. I’ve been going pretty often the last couple of weeks, and it’s common that my swipe card to get back in to the change room is finicky. I often have to swipe it 6 or 7 times before the door opens.

Today, however, the pass card decided not to work at all. I had to approach the lifeguard and, rather than doing a truly absurd act of charades, I whispered a little bit to explain that I was locked out. I’m not sure what she thought of my whispering, but she did try to help. Her passcard didn’t swipe either so she had to dash over to the lifeguard office to pull someone off of their lunch break to cover the pool and then run out to the front desk to try to get a working pass card.

In addition to being silent, I’m also quite blind and I don’t wear my contact lenses when I swim, so I had to hang around wet, without much ability to see, hoping that I’d eventually be let into the change room. After a certain length of waiting, I was getting dry enough that I probably could have just walked out the front of the pool and tried to use my swipe card at the front door to the change rooms since it usually works over there, but it would have been a bit embarrassing to parade around the Y hallways in my wet suit.

Finally the girl came back and got me in to the change room. I’m wondering what I should do for my swim tomorrow. Maybe I should write out a message and try to head of an incident by asking for a new pass card before I go swimming?

Everything is more complicated when you can’t speak.