I gave up on Botox as the anxiety I experienced around, during, before, and after the shots was more than I could manage. But, the effects of the injection change daily and I sure hope that you have some days that make it all worth it.

The hardest thing to remember is that the stuff wears off and you get to start all over again- hopefully each injection brings more relief and fewer side affects.

I have been through a similar experience with several of my botox injections. My voice will become quite high pitched (it eliminates the strain as you say, but doesn't produce a normal voice by any stretch) during the "breathy" phase. While it may take anywhere from 1 week to 1 month or more for the pitch to come back to "normal," it should come back to normal at some point. Don't worry, it's probably not "as good as it will get" from your injection... it should definitely improve (the volume increasing and the pitch decreasing) before the straining/breaking, etc. comes back. It is also impossible to project your voice (let alone yell) during this phase... in fact, people probably have to be right next to you in order to hear you without your trying (too) hard to make yourself heard. That is also a very common post-botox reaction.

As far as I know, several SD-ers have reported the high (helium) voice after botox. I don't find your experience to be unusual in light of what's been reported on this BB over the years, so keep hope that it will get better.

Some people also experience having to take many breaths to get through a few sentences (i.e., you need one whole breath to say 3-4 words, and then you need to breathe in again to start your next few words, sentences, etc.). So, in a sense, you start feeling out of breath while speaking.

While one form of breathiness may be more common than the other or they may both occur together, from what I've learned, I gather that both responses (together or separately) are "normal" initial reactions to botox injections.

I have experienced both types of post-botox reactions, sometimes the two together, etc.

You'll probably have to play around with the dosing over the next couple of months (or even years) to decide how much breathiness certain doses will produce, and/or how much breathiness you're willing to tolerate and if it corresponds to the quality and/or duration of your eventual "good or normal" voice period.

But the bottom line is that your reaction is defintiely not unusual and your voice should improve... it's just very difficult to predict how long it will take to improve until you've been through multiple injections.

Feel free to write me off line if you want to talk about post-botox breathiness, high pitched voice reactions, or any other reactions, including volume issues, etc. It's one of my favorite topics! :) It's also appears (from the tentative agenda) that this issue will be discussed at length at the upcoming NSDA conference in Washington, DC on March 8th. One of the reasons I love attending the 100% SD-focused conferences is because of the extreme detail the (excellent) speakers go into regarding all the nuances of botox treatment.

Don't worry, I get the high-pitched thing, too. It sounds exactly like my voice is crackig back in puberty. It is hardest to control when I am trying to speak loudly or am nervous. So it isn't really soft or breathy. I did experiment and significantly increase my dosage and fouund I eventually got to a breathy level but that lasted for a couple weeks and my voice was almost totally gone at the start. So my doctor and I think we went way to high. I've come back down to a level where my strain is gone, it fees like I can speak normally but at a quieter level. I also have the lower drops, more so when symptoms are returning, usually at the end of sentences or on vowel sounds.

For the lvel I'm at now, I generally will have an easy time talking but squeaking for 3-4 weeks, then a couple weeks of nearly perfect speech, then a gradual but not direct descent into returning symptoms. Generally the tightness in my speech and strain is what comes on. After a number of weeks where my voice quality can vay over a few days time, I might have the occasional spasm. I am working on controlling my speaking and breathing to better maintain the positive results and maximize the time between shots.

So that was a long way of saying no it is not uncomon for me to have a cracking/helium voice.