Kate wrote: > i know quite a few singers who have had nodes on their vocal cords & surgery > to remove them...a fellow musican told me joni had throat cancer awhile > back...but i don't know if it is true...
She was diagnosed with it about 14 years ago but it wasn't true. (thankfully they didn't do radical surgery on her back then due to a misdiagnosis). Below is a relevant portion of an article that essentially relates what she spoke about at the PWWAM taping. I may be wrong about the throat surgery but could swear I heard about it somewhere. Maybe she will talk about it all in her bio. Joni Mitchell by Giles Smith London Independent October 29, 1994 Before Joni Mitchell consulted a mystic healer on the matter of the bleeding lesion in her throat, she asked some conventionally qualified, AMA doctors about it and they informed her it was what Sammy Davis Jr had. The late Sammy Davis Jr. They told her it was caused by smoking and gave her five years Five years later when Joni Mitchell tells this story, we are approximately half way through our interview and she is approximately half way through a packet of Marlboro Lights. Mitchell chain-smokes, and it's one of the smoothest chains you've ever seen. As her left hand stubs one out, her right is already loosening the next from the packet. She's been smoking since she was nine - maybe literally - and she wasn't about to quit simply because her voice packed up during a video shoot and doctors were showing her fibre optic shots of an open wound on her larynx. "I grasped that smoking was an irritant," she says, "I didn't believe it was a cause." So (and here the story takes a mildly Californian twist) she sought a second opinion from a Hawaiian mystic called Oleta. "She's a two-powered mystic. With you fully dressed and lying on a table, she can see into your body by going wall-eyed, seeing light and shadow through your clothes. I said, 'Look in my throat, Oleta. Do you see death there?' 'No,' she said. This sounds so crackpot: she sent me water. The water was electrically charged and commanded to sluice and slowly restore. She fixed me. "It's healed up. My voice is fragile, but I do believe I'm singing better than ever in my life. I'm on the brink of being a great singer. I've lost my high end but I don't miss it - you don't need it. I had three and a half octaves, all of that stratospheric stuff was just trying to impress. Billie Holiday had seven notes. And what she did with it." http://www.jmdl.com/articles/view.cfm?id=169
