Alabama NewsCenter – Auburn University student uses lessons from class to help discover father’s brain tumor

By Charlotte Tuggle
Auburn University

Auburn University student Rachel Ruhlin never expected the lessons she learned in her audiology class might potentially save her father’s life, but that’s exactly what happened earlier this year.

Ruhlin — an incoming senior from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, studying Speech, Language and Hearing Science in the College of Liberal Arts — will eventually apply what she has learned in the program to her career. But Ruhlin is different in that she has already taken what she learned from the classroom all the way to the Mayo Clinic after she set a chain of events in motion that led to the discovery of her father’s brain tumor.

In class, Ruhlin learned about parts of the ear, the importance of hearing aids and tumors like acoustic neuromas that can cause hearing loss. Meanwhile, her father, Joe, had struggled with worsening hearing loss for years — talking on the phone on only one side, not hearing anything said near his left ear — so Rachel urged him to set up an appointment with an audiologist.

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