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Larry Page, Google's CEO, missed the company's annual meeting last week, and has already announced he's going to miss two upcoming big appointments for the company, prompting many to wonder about the state of his health.
Google is trying to play it cool, saying that nothing is wrong with Page and that things are running normally. At the annual shareholder's meeting at the company's headquarters that Page missed, Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Page "lost his voice" and "can't do any public speaking engagements for the time being." The company's already announced Page won't be speaking at the company's annual conference for software developers next week, and won't be speaking during their second quarter earnings conference call in mid-July.
Because of the way Apple handled Steve Jobs' deteriorating health, people are starting to wonder if things are on the up and up. Missing one or two appointments over a few days because of going hoarse is reasonable, but multiple things over the span of several weeks?
The Wall Street Journal's Amir Efrati and Joann S. Lublin spoke to a doctor who offered three potential things that could be wrong with Page, based on the vague "lost his voice" excuse Schmidt gave: "acute laryngitis, which is a viral infection that causes inflammation of the vocal cords and requires resting one's voice for at least week or two;" "muscle tension dysphonia, which occurs when the muscles around the larynx, or voice box, are too tight and causes a person to use excess tension while speaking;" or "benign lesions that grow on the vocal cord."