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By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
When Doug Smithwick saw his picture in the Times on July 20, with a story about his furniture business, he saw something more: an image that would change his life. The picture, by Times photographer James Borchuck, showed Doug, 52, with a tall-case clock he'd made out of recycled lumber and found objects. "I looked at that picture and saw how big my neck looked, and I thought, 'Oh my God, it didn't look good,' " Doug, 52, said last week. "I just thought I was putting on weight, but when I saw it in the newspaper, I thought, 'One side of my neck looks a lot bigger than the other.' I could tell something wasn't right." His older brother Bruce, who lives in Manhattan, says the photograph "possibly saved my brother's life." The picture "revealed a large lump on Douglas' throat that none of us had previously noticed," he said in an e-mail to the Times. The first doctor Doug consulted had a gloomy diagnosis, Bruce said: aggressive thyroid cancer. "That made us all go nuts, doing research on the Internet," he said. "We were going through hell for a while, we were all so upset about it." Then Doug sought a second opinion, from Dr. Alan M. Gall, a St. Petersburg head and neck specialist. He removed a tumor on Doug's thyroid that Doug described as weighing 2 pounds and "the size of a tennis ball" that turned out to be benign. While Dr. Gall wouldn't discuss Doug's case specifically, he was willing to chat about thyroid tumors in general. "We see this fairly often," he said. Don't confuse them with the double chin that lots of people develop as they age and put on weight, he said. Typically a thyroid mass will develop low in the neck, between the larynx and the collarbone, well below the jowl line. (In Doug's case, his mother had a fleshy neck, so "he said he guessed he had the same neck as his mother," Bruce said. Not so.) Signs to watch for, Dr. Gall said, include any obvious neck mass, pressure in the neck, or difficulty swallowing. Usually lumps are not painful. Masses on the thyroid "are generally picked up during a routine physical rather than by the patient," he said. The thyroid controls the body's metabolism. A lump "most of the time would not" affect the thyroid's functioning, he said, so a patient might not notice other signs of trouble. Now Doug is on the mend, still a little tired from his surgery but "feeling good," he says. "He says now he looks like Clark Gable, with a much sharper profile," Bruce said.
The story has another happy ending. When he first thought the lump was malignant, Doug made the decision to quit his day job -- selling toner cartridges -- and devote himself fulltime to making furniture. "No more toner supplies. I don't want to see another toner cartridge as long as I live," he said. The manager of a local furniture store saw the story and offered to give him parts and pieces from damaged and repaired furniture, which should cut back on Doug's scavenging for materials to create his "shabby-chic" furniture. "I've got a whole garageful," he said, "arms, legs, tabletops, neat stuff of all kinds. I won't have to buy wood for quite a while." As a result of the earlier story, he now shows his furniture at One Stop Kitchen and Bath at 2599 22nd Ave. N in St. Petersburg. And if he can talk his wife, Michelle, into it, he's thinking about moving to the mountains of Virginia, where he can use a barn as his workshop. "It's been a rough three weeks," he said. "But what a difference a day makes. I never would have discovered it unless I'd seen my big old fat neck in the newspaper." -- Doug Smithwick can be reached at (727) 421-6935.
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