Daily Grit by Wes Thorp

I'm not making this up about having a growth on my tongue that needs to be biopsied and a goiter the size of an apple

Meet my ear, nose and throat surgeon on the right  

My wife said it looked kinky when my ear, nose and throat doctor stuck about a twelve inch video cable up my nose and ran it down to my throat.  It was a follow-up on the findings from a CAT scan and angiogram of my brain that I had last week.

Those tests were ordered after it was found that I have a blockage in my two carotid arteries, one is 100 percent blocked and the other, it was found, was 20 percent.  As part of this, the imaging tests showed that I had a growth on the base of my tongue and in the neighborhood of that I had a goiter the size of an apple.  

After talking about any throat symptoms I had, she pulled out the cable with a small video monitor on the end.  It felt like a long worm crawling down the inside front of my face.  It wasn't painful, but it felt weird, even though it brought some tears to my eyes.

Next step is surgery and getting the okay for a biopsy of the troubled part of my tongue.  Because of my plugged carotids, I need to get my vascular doctor to okay my staying off blood thinners for a week and I have to get my primary care doctor to give his okay.

I've got a bunch of stuff in my head.

 

In the past year, I was smiling that I was content with my vision problems brought on by glaucoma and by a cornea that had to be transplanted.

What does all this mean?  I'm not sure.  Some of it could be just a normal part of aging with all this happening on a compressed schedule.

My prayer life has stepped up in the past two weeks for sure.  I'm counting on God hearing those prayers for peace and for healing in all this.  I know that he's there and I'm constantly reminding myself that he will be my shield.

What do you do when you've been bombarded with a bucketful of curve balls.  When I wake up in the middle of the night, I talk to him and ask him for peace.  How's that working?  My Apple watch shows my Beats Per Minute right now being high as I write this.

My friend Ken and I recently read Philip Yancey's book Disappointment With God where he gets into Job and how he reacted to a whole bunch of really nasty stuff in his life.  I pray that I can learn from his reaction.

In the past two days, I've found myself looking at people's tongues more and more.  And I've looked at YouTube videos of surgeries where biopsies of the tongue are taken.

I am counting on being able to sense His presence as my ailment list gets longer.

Doctor says having a fully blocked carotid artery should not be problematic in my day-to-day living

I'm watching my weight closely

Yesterday, we met with my vascular doctor who shared the results of my recent CAT scan and angiogram of my head and its attendant arteries.  I have one that's fully blocked and the official reading on the other is 20 percent.  

Because of the fully blocked carotid, I'm not a candidate for a surgical fix.  It was explained to me that I might end up with great blood flow but at the price of a stroke.  There, apparently, is overwhelming evidence that would be the outcome.

So, my future lies with keeping the 20 percent from growing.  Because of alternate pathways for the blood flow, I can live with the partially clogged carotid.  I have to take the blood thinner Plavix and stay healthy.

What happens if the partially closed artery becomes more blocked.  His answer wasn't clear.  I don't have to worry about that today.

Tomorrow, a specialist looks at the soft tissue mass in my larynx that was discovered during the CAT scan.  What is it?  I have no idea.  Right now, I'm late for a walk through our back forty.

Breakfast this morning--two poached eggs--was brought to me today by my wife and Amazon

Do you like poached eggs?  I do.  However, very seldom do I vary my breakfast from my usual oatmeal with fruit on the top.  Our old egg poacher was showing its age and we needed a new one.  We went to where America shops--Amazon and we found this one.  My poached eggs this morning were superb along with two pieces of dry, light toast.

Every morning I say "good morning" to my kids and grandkids and I pray for them individually

This collage hangs in the hallway to our condo. I see our whole family all the time.

My routine is pretty much the same everyday.  I get up put eyedrops in both eyes, grab a cup of coffee and stake out my side of the couch with my iPad Pro.  As I walk down our hallway, I pass a photo collage that my wife Gladys put together.  It's composed of pictures taken at this past summer's family vacation on Lake Michigan.  

As I come out of our bathroom, I mentally say "good morning" to everybody and I do the same at bedtime.  In the morning, I say it to myself because I don't want my semi-sleeping wife to think I asked her a question.

I also pray for their day that God would protect each of them, including their hearts which is their command center for how they deal with life.

There are many other family pictures in our condo, but the collage is the spark that gets me thanking God for my family.

 

How should I react to the new finding of a soft tissue mass in my larynx?

My son is now drinking the beer that I would drink. Now that I'm taking the blood thinner Plavix I can't drinking any kind of alcohol.

 

I had just entered a video call where four of us--my son-Justin Thorp; my son-in-law Adam Jones and close friend Ken Alexander spend a half hour or so talking about our daily lives and then praying together.

With the video camera on, my cellphone rang.  I noticed it was my primary care physician and I was hoping for news about a CT scan and angiogram of my carotid arteries that I had taken the day before.  It was partially.  

There was no news about my plugged carotids--one is a hundred percent and the other 50--but there was an early finding about a soft tissue mass found in my larynx.  I spent the next several hours trying to figure out what that means or could mean.

Consider it was a Friday afternoon.  I wanted more information, but I couldn't get through to a doctor.  I talked to a snippy nurse who said she couldn't give that information over the phone and that the doctor wasn't available and I talked to a medical assistant who said the doctor had left by that time.  So I was left to my own devices with the web.

I checked Google for information about cancer of the larynx.  I matched some of the symptoms, but my daughter told me to be careful about going down rabbit holes that web information creates.

So here I am with apparent carotid artery disease and a lump of unknown composition in my larynx that could leave me talking like the cop on Chicago PD who talks like he has rocks in his mouth.  

How am I taking all this?

It depends on the time you ask.  I'm anxious and I am frustrated and I'm praying all the time.  It's an ongoing conversation with God asking for his healing and for his leading and thanking him for everything that he's given me like my family.

I'm now more liable to write down the names of people who ask me to pray for them and more liable to pray for them in the middle of the night when I get up to pee.

I know God's there and he is listening to me and watching out for me.  Am I nervous about this?  You bet.

 

I'm still processing what the vascular surgeon told me about my clogged carotid arteries

Sitting against a tree last Sunday on the Detroit River.

I felt like I was just tasered yesterday when the vascular surgeon told me there's nothing they could do for my clogged arteries in my neck, one is fully blocked and the other is less than 50 percent, he said.  My wife Gladys was sitting next to me in the exam room when he told me that my hope for getting blood to my brain and to my eyes would be centered around a blood thinner that could probably clean out our kitchen sink.

A CLARIFICATION: The doctor pointed out that with the right carotid being less than 50 percent blocked that the Plavix blood thinner that he prescribed can be effective.  There are apparently other sources of blood supply to the brain too.  It's serious, but not dire.

Since learning that I have clogged carotids, I had been researching surgeries to unclog them.  YouTube is filled with all kinds of video showing the amazing procedure where the carotid is cut open and the blockage is tweezed out.  But, the doctor said that experience has shown that when one of the arteries is blocked 100 percent that the risks are too high.  Strokes and death can easily be the result.

One last hope is an imaging test that can determine whether there's even a trickle of blood through the artery that's completely blocked.  He said, the odds are against that happening.

So, what are my thoughts about this as I celebrate one whole week of being 72 years old?  The words bucket list come to mind.  Going forward, I need to be extra picky about what I do and think.  At various points in my life, I felt more freedom to ignore doing certain things.  And, right now, I'm carefully going through my list of what's important to me and what's not.

Let me emphasize that no one has said I'm on the verge of needing to cut the grass of my cemetery plot and no one has said I'm in imminent danger of having a stroke or a heart attack.  But, I know the realities of what I'm dealing with as I move forward in my glaucoma and cornea journey.

As I'm moving ahead with all this and as I watch episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond for the umpteenth time, I'm trying to pay attention to what's important to me.

Christian songwriter and singer Matt Redmond has a song 10,000 Reasons.  It's about giving praise and thanks to God at all stages of life from birth to old age and to death.  I know that I've surpassed 10,000 reasons by many times.  My wife, my kids, their spouses and my grandkids.  My memory bank is filled with reasons.  

God has blessed me greatly and I know it, even though I might not always show it.  The Bible is always in my pocket and I open it throughout the day.  Today, I'm asking for His help in giving my anxiety to him.  I want him to carry it and I know he will.  It's a promise that I'm betting my life on.

"May your will be done Lord."  

 

Founders Backwood Bastard from Grand Rapids should be the "state beer" of Michigan

Do you recognize the guy on the label of the beer my son and I are drinking?

 I first drank a glass of Founders Backwoods Bastard at Horrocks in Lansing.  My son and I had gone there as part of a tradition he and I started at Thanksgiving time when he and his family visited from out of state.  Since then I've gone there with my son-in-law several times.

Drinking Backward Bastard changed my beer tastes forever.  With it, I became familiar with barrel-aged beer where beer is left to meld with tastes of scotch and other tastes.

Fast Forwarding to this past weekend when I turned 72 and when my whole family came to celebrate our daughter and son-in-law, as part of a birthday gift, bought a four pack which is about the same cost as filling your gas tank on a SUV.

While sitting on our couch after a trip to the Jazz Festival in Downtown Detroit, we pulled out two bottles from my birthday gift.  It was a grand taste and a fitting way to start year number 73.

I'd recommend Backwoods Bastard to beer lovers.