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Medical mystery solved, he's ready for American Ninja Warrior

Doug Black Jr. clambered up a 14-foot wall, vaulted over hurdles, and leaped off an 11-foot ledge, somersaulting into a pit filled with foam cubes.

Doug Black (left) is watched closely by coach Lewis Harder at HFS Parkour.
Doug Black (left) is watched closely by coach Lewis Harder at HFS Parkour.Read moreELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Staff Photographer

Doug Black Jr. clambered up a 14-foot wall, vaulted over hurdles, and leaped off an 11-foot ledge, somersaulting into a pit filled with foam cubes.

The gym session, part of his preparation to qualify for the TV show American Ninja Warrior, was hard, sweaty work.

Not so long ago, it would have been impossible.

The Port Richmond resident suffered from a rare condition that robbed him of his sense of balance, caused severe nausea, and gave him a painfully amped-up sense of hearing, to the point that he could hear his own heartbeat.

The worst of it was, the first two physicians Black consulted could not tell him why. Friends were equally puzzled, especially when he started wearing noise-blocking earmuffs just to hold a normal conversation.

"Everyone had started looking at me like I was insane, as if it was all in my head," said Black, 35, who runs a homeless shelter in Chester.

Technically, it was.

Black eventually sought help from surgeons at Temple University Hospital and now is back in action, regularly catapulting his lean, 5-foot-11 frame over obstacles at a gym called HFS Parkour.

Regional qualifying rounds for American Ninja Warrior are being held May 26 and 27 in Philadelphia, and Black hopes to make it as a walk-on contestant.

He will surely be the only candidate who, in order to compete, had to have a hole drilled in his head.

'Like lightning'

It all started three years ago, when Black was practicing the guitar for a church performance. Suddenly, he collapsed.

"I just felt like lightning had struck down my spine," he said.

His wife, Kelly, worried that he might be having a stroke, wanted to call 911. Not necessary, he replied.

Though he felt wobbly and dizzy, Black eventually was able to stand up and struggle home. But, weirdly, everyday sounds began to seem uncomfortably loud.

That week he went to his primary-care physician, who, in turn, referred him to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. The diagnosis was hyperacusis, which means increased sensitivity to certain sounds - nothing Black didn't already know.

But as for a cause, the physician had no answers, Black said. The condition can be triggered by head injury, certain medicines, or infection, among other factors. None of them could explain his dizziness and other symptoms.

A few years earlier, Black got in shape by running, lifting weights, and cutting back on sugary treats. He slimmed down from 260 pounds to just 175 at his lowest point.

But once the dizzy spells began, he started to feel down in the dumps, and eventually decided to tack on the "ninja" training. He became a frequent visitor to HFS Parkour, where gym owner Lewis Harder has all sorts of hurdles, ledges, monkey bars, and other off-the-wall obstacles that mimic the ones on the TV show.

But Black's vertigo and the hypersensitive hearing did not get better. Eventually, they started to get worse.

Standing on the second floor of his rowhouse, he could hear a faucet dripping in the first-floor bathroom. Normal sounds, just from playing with his kids or listening to music, became "excruciating."

"Every day was agony," he said.

A year ago, while training one day at the gym, Black felt a sudden pain in the back of his arm while climbing a wall, and fell. The next day at work, he got sick four times and fell twice.

That did it. In an internet search, he found the Temple Head and Neck Institute and Pamela Roehm, its director of otology and neurotology - a subspecialty of ear, nose, and throat medicine that includes treatment of hearing and balance disorders related to the structure of the ear and the nearby skull base.

He went through a series of appointments, including another hearing exam - yep, still off the charts - and then tests to see how his ears responded to pressure. When they conducted that test in his right ear, he immediately felt as if the world flipped upside down.

Hearing the eyeballs

The culprit, Roehm and her colleagues suspected, was a mouthful: superior semicircular canal dehiscence syndrome. Found in perhaps five out of 1,000 people, it is characterized by a break in the bony covering atop the three canals that govern the human balance system.

The cause is unclear, but seems more likely to occur in people whose bony covering is thinner than normal. It is more common in the overweight, perhaps due to increased intracranial pressure, the bone eventually wearing away with each heartbeat, Roehm said.

Roehm said there is no evidence that exercise can cause it, but she noted that Black's workouts were "pretty intense."

Black was scheduled for a CT scan, and that confirmed it. A hole in that bony layer was allowing his brain to push directly on the balance system. That is why he could hear his heart beat and other internal noises, because the semicircular canals are connected to the parts of the ear that perceive sound.

"Often people will hear their eyeballs move," Roehm said. "It's very disconcerting, apparently."

Surgery could help, she told him. He was eager to try it.

So in August, Roehm and colleague Kadir Erkmen, Temple's director of cerebrovascular neurosurgery, went to work.

Normally, for this type of repair, surgeons cut out a 4- to 5-centimeter section of skull to gain access, actually lifting the brain to insert a microscope - a technique that generally leads to swelling, Erkmen said.

Instead, he and Roehm have come up with a minimally invasive approach: drilling a one-centimeter hole and snaking in a flexible endoscope.

Then they take the bone from that hole to fix the one in the bony covering atop the patient's balance system. In Black's case, they first plugged the hole with a mixture of sterile beeswax and bone shavings from the patient's skull. Then they covered the plug with a bone graft.

When Black woke from the anesthesia, the results were instantaneous.

"The world was just so quiet," he recalled. "I remember sitting in the recovery room, snapping my fingers by my ears to make sure I wasn't crazy."

It took Black a while to recalibrate himself to his surroundings. After years of walking while dizzy, Black had to learn to walk all over again.

But before long, he was back at the gym.

American Ninja Warrior's primary means of evaluating contestants is through video auditions, which have concluded. The show also allows a number of walk-on performers, and that is where Black hopes to make his mark.

If he does well in the competition, great. But even taking part would make him happy.

"It's more about getting up there and really kind of making it a victory for me," Black said. "A year ago, I could barely walk."

tavril@phillynews.com

215-854-2430

@TomAvril1