Thank you all for your concern and input, my friends. I am overwelmed by your support - your ideas on what could be going on with me. Joanna: Videostrobe was clean. For the hernia surgery, I was not intubated, but the vocal decline (cracking and flatting) began happening from before the surgery- when the hernia first started. No abdominal complications. My breath use does feel different- I run out of air much more quickly now and it feels labored. Where before I could fill an opera house with my voice, I now have difficulty projecting, or even calling to another room. The voice will crack like a 13 year old, and get rhaspy and hoarse within seconds. There is muscle fatique now much more often than before, but that could be due to using the voice drastically less than when I was regularly performing. The problem seems to almost dissappear, or at least is drastically less when I try not to project at all, sort of like extremely soft singing - in a piano piannissimo, which is what I am practicing with now.
Mimi Daeva: Your idea of Re-calibration is very interesting, and that definitely is something I should do. Do you have any good excersizes for this? I wish I had the money to have a voice teacher right now to help me recalibrate, but my funds have almost all run out with no new jobs in sight, other than a very temporary, part time, minimum wage, dead end job - far from the wonderful career I once had.
Robert and Joanna: I'd love to try working with you.
Overall, I am so impressed with this forum and love the fact that everyone here throws around various ideas to help solve a situation. Thank you all for your much needed help. As I mentioned earlier, I am trying to recalibrate the voice by practicing very light and sweet singing now with the hope that eventually with time, my volume returns without the problems.