By Landon Nayoan –
As she went into a tracheostomy surgery, the doctor told her, “Say goodbye to your voice because your voice is probably going to be gone after this surgery.”
Laurinda Bennett was staggered: “Gone?”
“There’s a chance it may come back.”
When she woke up from the surgery, she couldn’t speak.
It was bleak, but at least she was surviving cancer.
Laurinda spent 2½ weeks in ICU after her December 2025 surgery. Her voice was gone but she could walk. As she walked around the ICU, she realized all the other patients were bedridden and unconscious. She realized her own predicament was better than theirs.
Laurinda began to pray for the patients.
“Lord, if you could just restore my voice back even so that they can hear the prayers that come out to bring healing to every unit that I walk by,” she prayed in her head.
“After I said that I heard a crackling in my throat,” she recalls. “I’m like, Can I talk? Can I talk? I was like, Hello hello hello.
“My voice is back,” she realized.
And that’s how Laurinda Bennett got her voice back after being told she wouldn’t. The doctor did a double-take when she said “Hi.”
“You’re not supposed to be able to talk,” the doctor said.
Today Laurinda has another testimony to share to the world. First was her recovery from her divorce, then her cancer survival. She wanted to survive to take care of her daughter.
For weeks, doctors missed the diagnosis on her throat cancer, treating for Covid, strep and other diseases. By the time they figured out her vocal chords were swollen, the cancer was stage 3 and had spread to the rest of her body.
Laurinda was distressed. Already her divorce was enough for one person, she reasoned. But God gave her John 4:11: This sickness will not end in death.
She received 50 rounds of radiation with weekly chemotherapy. People with her condition usually get 15 rounds of radiation.
It was debilitating, but she was young and strong.
Then she couldn’t breathe.
Again, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong until they put a camera down her throat. Her vocal chords were paralyzed. She was heli-evacuated to a larger hospital that could perform the operation, an emergency tracheostomy.
A tracheostomy is opening a whole in her lower neck to bypass the vocal chords and let air flow to the trachea. Laurinda wears a decorative band over the gaping hole.
She was devastated by the news that she needed the tracheostomy. Why God? She asked.
I promised you you would survive, not that it would be easy, he responded.
Then she got even worse news. She would almost certainly never speak again.
But God had another plan.
