Owen Tripp

Yeah, it's amazing to say nine years, Eric, but obviously, as your listeners will soon understand, a pretty vivid memory in my past.

So I sort of had been working as I do and noticed sort of a loss of hearing in my right ear.

I'd never experienced any hearing loss before.

And I went twice actually to a sort of national primary care chain that now owned by Amazon actually.

And they described it as eustachian tube dysfunction, which you know is a pretty benign common thing that basically meant that sort of my tubes were blocked and that I needed to have some drainage.

They recommended Sudafed to no effect.

And it was only a couple of weeks later where I was walking actually some of the senior medical team at my company down to the San Francisco Giants game.

And I was describing this experience of hearing loss.

And I said I was also losing a little bit of sensation in the right side of my ear.

And they said, that is not eustachian tube dysfunction.

And, well, I can let the story unfold from there.

But basically...

My colleagues helped me quickly put together a plan to get this properly diagnosed and treated.

The underlying condition is called vestibular schwannoma, even more commonly known as an acoustic neuroma.

So a pretty rare, benign brain tumor that exists on the vestibular nerve.

And it would have cost my life had it not been treated.

Well, the first doctor was probably an internal medicine doctor.

And I think it's fair to say that he had probably not seen many, if any, cases.

By the time I reached an ENT, they were interested in working me up for what's known as SSNHL, Sudden Sensory Neural Hearing Loss.

which is basically a fancy term for you lose hearing for a variety of possible pathologies and reasons, but you go through a process of differential diagnosis to understand what's actually going on.