Welcome to Charlie's CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.
Charlie's journal will be updated by me, Helen Walsh, Charlie's wife. Frankly, we were hesitant to even post on Caring Bridge, however, so many people wanted to keep up with Charlie and his health that we decided to go ahead so that his friends could know how he is doing.
As most of our friends and family know Charlie has been dealing with Parkinsons for over 12 years now. He is doing very well with his medicine and continuing to enjoy retirement. For several months Charlie had been continuing to lose weight and he was becoming a bit frail due to this. He was having a great deal of difficulty swallowing and he was not able to keep the food down once he had swallowed.
On August 6, Charlie was vomiting and there was blood involved. Immediately we took him to ER at Wellstar North Fulton. He was admitted and several tests were completed. One of the test was a esophagoscopy. This is a procedure in which a flexible endoscope is inserted through the mouth into the esophagus. This gives the doctor a view into the esophagus to determine if there is blockage. The discovered a mass in his esophagus that was almost completely blocking, which is what was causing his inability to swallow any food. Even water was coming back up. They did a biopsy and found that it was malignant - Stage 3 esophagusal cancer.