Rock ’n’ roll veterans Stryper recently released their long-awaited Christmas album, “The Greatest Gift Of All.” The 10-song album includes five traditional Christmas tunes as well as five original Christmas-themed tracks.
Singer/guitarist Michael Sweet recently appeared on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation” with Eddie Trunk where he detailed a scary health situation he’s facing. Sweet has been diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer.
“Well, I’ve noticed over the past 10 years some issues with my neck and my voice, a little more difficulty singing like I wanna sing,” Sweet explained. “And I just wrote it off to getting older and age and whatnot. I went in and got checked and they scoped me and did an ultrasound and they discovered that I had some nodules on my thyroid on each side. And they just kept an eye on those for a number of years. And they got bigger, they got larger, and then one in particular, the one on my left side, got large enough where they wanted to biopsy it, and it came back malignant. I had surgery two years ago to have that removed. My right side, I have Hashimoto’s [chronic autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid gland] and I had a nodule on that side, but it wasn’t suspicious. They didn’t think I’d have any issues with that. Having the other side removed and going on medication, well, obviously things took a different direction. There was some new calcification in that nodule and they did a biopsy and it came back malignant. So I gotta go through (surgery) again.”
Sweet continued: “I’ve got all these people who — God bless them, and I appreciate it — are reaching out to me about holistic medicine and natural healing and this and that. And to be honest with you, I just wanna get it out of there. And I don’t wanna mess around with it… It’s papillary, slow growing. It’s at a stage where I’m okay, but if I ignore it and I’m not proactive, it’ll get to a point where it will eventually spread, and then I’ve got real issues.”
Best wishes to Michael Sweet from everyone at Web Is Jericho on a quick and speedy recovery. Check out Stryper’s video for “Winter Wonderland” below.
