Welcome. My name is Gail, I live in Portland, Oregon, USA, and I have a brain tumor. Even writing that just now, wow. I led a medically boring life until I was 45 years old and symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and vertigo started to appear. That was April 2021. In June, a brain MRI revealed my first (wrong) diagnosis of a small acoustic neuroma. I had brain surgery in November 2021, where my surgeons observed the tumor as a facial nerve schwannoma. They opted not to remove the tumor, for reasons, and I still have my tumor non-friend as of this writing in May 2023.

I started this blog in early 2023 as a way to make sense of the strange experience of having an extremely rare brain tumor. I host a small invader in my brain. It’s not going to kill me, but it will slowly disfigure my face. It’s taking my hearing on my left side. You can’t tell by looking at me that I have a problem. I’m healthy and strong, but I lose my balance more than I’d like.

I want to build community with people experiencing wildly improbable medical issues like mine, especially people with facial nerve schwannomas. Because facial nerve tumors are rare, there isn’t much of an online community. As of this writing there are 8.9K members of the Acoustic Neuroma / Vestibular Schwannoma Group on Facebook, but only 104 members in the Facial Nerve Neuroma / Schwannoma group. There are less than 5 specialty clinics for facial nerve dysfunction in the USA. (I am fortunate that one such clinic is in my city.) If you have a facial nerve schwannoma, I want to hear from you.