Action News Now reporter Lauren Cooper broke the story of a local singer whose life was changed forever by a health crisis.
Chico, California -On this week’s Wellness Wednesday, Action News Now reporter Lauren Cooper tells the story of a local signer whose life was changed by a medical scare.
Kayla Davidson has been a talented singer all her life.
“I was the kind of kid who, when I was about 3 years old, would get up on stage during the holidays and start singing to an audience,” Davidson said.
By age five, Davidson was landing roles in musicals, and by age 15, she was teaching others how to sing.
“I think the thing I love most about singing is that for a long time, it was a place where I felt free,” Davidson said.
A few years after graduating from Inspire School of the Arts, Davidson began her career as an opera singer.
Soon after, she began considering music programs at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music.
“The dream school that I really wanted to go to was Curtis, which is basically a full-blown music school that takes like eight students a year, and that’s the whole class, not just singers,” she said.
After she sent her audition video to Curtis, the results came back promising, with positive feedback from professors and other world-renowned musicians.
“Saying ‘I can’t wait to meet you’ was the most positive feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’ve never felt better about myself than I did in that moment,” Davidson said.
Then, less than two months before her big audition, her world came crashing down.
“I was doing shows and singing multiple genres and singing all day every day with no issues and I was really straining my voice. One day during rehearsal I was singing really hard and my voice just started to get weird. I had these little ticking pains in my vocal cords and I started to get short of breath,” Davidson said.
She saw lung and stomach doctors but got no answers, and her voice gradually slowed and faded away.
“So I went to UCSF in San Francisco and worked with their voice specialists. These are people who work with opera singers at the San Francisco Opera House. I showed them videos of me singing and said this is what I do, but I can’t do it, this feels really weird. And they looked down my throat and did an endoscopy, which went all the way up my nose, and they found that I had what they call some of the worst vocal damage they’ve seen in a young professional singer,” Davidson said.
Davidson told Action News Now that her anatomically larger than average lungs help her sing by allowing her to expel more air, but she also has small holes in her vocal cords.
Then it was discovered she had a benign tumor growing in her throat.
Davidson had to undergo surgery to remove the tumor just before her final audition, forcing her to give up on attending her dream school.
Afterwards, she was unable to make a sound or speak for two months.
“I lost my identity and sense of self for a really long time. It was a crazy transition from being a professional chatterbox and teaching kids all day every day to total silence and having to retrain everything,” Davidson said.
Three years on, Davidson says her voice still isn’t the same, but she feels better mentally.
“I wouldn’t really change anything. I’m actually very happy with where I am right now and the people around me and my students make every day worthwhile,” Davidson said.
Davidson says the biggest thing you can do to maintain vocal stability and durability is to not let your voice wear out too quickly.
She also says that exercising, staying hydrated and avoiding smoking can also help a lot.
“This is a very common sense thing that we don’t always think about, but being harmonious is the best thing we can do,” Davidson said.
While Davidson is doing well so far, she told Action News Now there’s still a chance that some of the scar tissue in her throat could come back as another tumor, so she’s keeping an eye out for signs and paying more attention to her vocal health.
Mr. Davidson currently teaches at Chico Creek Dance Center.
She is a nominee for Best Music Teacher in this year’s Best of Chico, with voting opening July 1st.
