As if the challenge of a fire that destroyed his production facility wasn’t enough. As if Covid and how it disrupted and challenged his business wasn’t enough. As founder and president of Rustic Crust, Brad Sterl had to overcome a personal challenge during this period: a brain tumor.

The first indication that something might be wrong was when he’d try to sleep.

“My heartbeat would keep me awake at night,” he recalls. This was in 2016, two years into the recovery from the devastating fire that destroyed Rustic Crust’s production facility in Pittsfield, two years into getting the company’s stride back.

“I had a hard time sleeping. Literally, I could lay on my pillow, and it would sound like my heart was in my ear,” he says.

A visit to his doctor led to an MRI, which found a tumor that doctors thought was benign but warranted watching, with follow-up MRIs every six months.

In the months that followed, Sterl pushed through his personal challenges — the surgery, the rehab, the hearing loss — the way he pushed Rustic Crust through the dual challenges of the fire and Covid.

“You can sit back to kind of let things happen as they are, or you can choose to move ahead,” he says. “It’s just always been my style — I’m not about failing or being held back. It’s about making sure it gets done.”

It got to a point after several months in 2019 that Sterl started falling, breaking an arm, and the decision was made to remove the tumor. With his wife, Marissa, who has a medical background, they researched the options for where to have the surgery and the risks involved.

“It was putting pressure on my facial nerve, my hearing nerve and my balance nerve specifically, in addition to the base of my brain,” he says. “Almost every surgeon I talked to said, ‘You’re going to lose your hearing. It’s likely it’ll disrupt your facial nerves, you could have paralysis and there’s a likelihood you have significant trouble walking.’” The 12-hour procedure to remove the tumor took place at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston just before Christmas 2019. He recalls getting up to try to take his first steps 15 hours later. “My attitude was I was going to walk,” he says.

In fact, when he moved a few days later from the ICU to a regular room, he walked without a wheelchair.

“I won’t call it pretty, but I walked, and two days later I was out of the hospital instead of being in the hospital for up to a month. It’s just an attitude, in my opinion,” he says.

The surgery left him without any hearing in his left ear. He notes that the acoustic nerve was sacrificed during surgery so that his facial nerve stayed intact, saving him from a drooping face.

As he literally worked to regain his footing, he also had an eye at getting back to the office, despite some medical encouragement that he take an extended leave.

“Look, I run my company; that’s not going to work for me,” he told the doctors. “It was five weeks when I decided to go and see if I could drive, and I was in the office at week six,” he says.

Surgery to place a cochlear implant in his head took place in late October 2020, also at Brigham and Women’s, which he described as “exceptional.” According to Sterl, the implant was a recently approved model. “It was one of the newest versions, which allowed you to transfer hearing through the bone in your head right into my left ear,” he says.

He needed physical therapy to train his brain how to maintain his balance without the use of the body’s natural balancing mechanism — the vestibular system — in his left ear. By the spring, he was able to sail again during a trip to the Caribbean … without getting seasick.

And he wasn’t going to use the excuse of his surgeries or the aches and pains that followed or the rehab challenges to stay home, especially in the early spring of 2020 when Covid-19 upended life as everyone knew it.

“It’s about making sure it gets done,” he says. “We had all these people during Covid, and as that came out, it was all the more reason for me to be engaged in the business. I wanted to make sure my employees felt comfortable. We were mitigating their fears — my stuff was secondary.”