Italian’s Larynx Surgery Goes Well, Doctor Says

ORANGE — A complex surgical operation on an Italian woman who wanted to repair her damaged voice to allow her to speak normally again went smoothly Friday, said the woman’s surgeon at UCI Medical Center.

“She’s doing great,” said Adriana Cioce’s surgeon, Dr. Roger L. Crumley.

Cioce, 42, a tour guide in Rome, arrived here last week. She was scheduled for surgery Tuesday but doctors had postponed the operation after she developed a heart irregularity.

“As for the irregularity,” Crumley said, “it didn’t arise at all. She just may have been very anxious on Tuesday.”

Cioce’s larynx was injured during a 1993 thyroid operation in Italy, and despite months of speech therapy she has not been able to fully recover.

During surgery, Crumley said the vocal cord nerve was a little smaller and seemed fragile.

Crumley, who heads the medical center’s department of otolaryngology--head and neck surgery-- is a leading surgeon in the field of nerve grafting, a technique he developed to repair damaged larynxes such as Cioce’s.

Although her surgery went well, Cioce will not know how successful the operation was until the grafting heals in about three months.