Live long enough and eventually everyone experiences an event that reshapes their future.
For Mike Huck, an irrigation consultant and one of Southern California's leading voices on water issues affecting the golf industry, that moment occurred nearly two decades ago, and he carries around reminders to this day.
Surgery 19 years ago to remove a benign tumor the size of a golf ball that was pushing against his brain and a cluster of nerves has left the 61-year-old Huck essentially with one good ear and a positive outlook that can inspire others.
"The sky was never bluer, and flowers were never brighter than they were then," Huck said. "You think about your own mortality when you're recovering using a walker."
He has advice for anyone facing a life-changing health issue: Don't "settle" for just any doctor, and for goodness sake, refrain from scouring the World Wide Web to self-diagnose the problem.
Indeed, the road to a place of serenity was one wrought with potholes.
When Huck complained of impaired hearing in his right ear in 1999, doctors initially could find nothing wrong. Then an agronomist with the USGA Green Section and a former superintendent, Huck found solace from the daily grind in skeet shooting, and doctors said his hearing loss might be attributed to repeated exposure to loud machinery at work, or gunfire after it.
It wasn't until Huck sought help from an ear, nose and throat specialist that he learned neither his hobby nor his job was to blame. An MRI revealed a tumor, called an acoustic neuroma, the size of a golf ball in his inner ear.
"I knew with that type of tumor there was a good chance it was benign," said Huck, now 61.
"But when a doctor tells you that you have a tumor, your world is rocked."
Huck stressed the importance finding the right doctor. He searched far and wide, including one in Newport Beach that he compared to a used-car salesman.
"I couldn't sleep at night, so I was always on the computer doing research. Stay off the Internet. All I read were the horror stories. It scared the living hell out of me," he said. "Do your homework picking doctors, and find someone you trust and believe in."
Through the connections of a family member who is a pediatrician in Chicago, Huck eventually connected with the team at the House Clinic in Los Angeles.
There he worked with Dr. William Hitselberger, who explained the positives and negatives about the procedure and all the steps involved.
It wasn't until after the tumor was removed that the surgeon could perform a biopsy that showed the growth was benign. That was the good news. The bad news was that in the meantime, it had crushed the acoustic nerve, resulting in a 90-percent hearing loss in his right ear.
"The problem wasn't that it was cancerous; it wasn't.The problem was space occupation and location," he said. "It was wedged against the brainstem and where the spinal cord and nerves come together. If it were allowed to grow, it could crush a nerve that controls involuntary functions, like breathing. Then you fall over and they think you've just had a heart attack."
His recovery was slow, and involved learning to walk all over again and more than a half-year of severely compromised equilibrium brought about by an intense case of vertigo.
"When I woke up in recovery, it felt like my bed was pinned to the wall sideways," he said. "I remember I had to close my eyes again right away, or I was going to throw up."
Doctors told him that vertigo was normal in such cases and that it should last about six weeks or so.
It was about eight months before everything Huck was seeing stopped moving long enough so he could walk a relatively straight line or safely get behind the wheel of a car again.
"I still have issues with that," he said. "I wander a bit when I walk. My eyes have to see where my feet are going, because I don't have a sense of balance. If I get up in the middle of the night, I have to hold onto the walls. If I try to walk without being able to see things around me, I don't work so well anymore."
Doctors told him no drinking, smoking or coffee during his recovery. It was at a subsequent Golf Industry Show in New Orleans, where drinking, smoking and strong coffee are in plentiful supply, that he began to write his own prescription for his recovery.
A friend convinced him that one beer couldn't do much harm. In fact, he claims it has done wonders for his equilibrium.
"The previous morning, I was walking to the convention center and stumbled into the people I was with," he said. "The next morning after a beer the night before, I was able to walk a straight line. I nicknamed it the Miracle on Bourbon Street. When I told my doctor my cure was to have a couple of beers, he said it was a good story, but he wasn't buying it. It's my story, and I'm sticking to it."