Get featured image thubmanil

Hey guys,
I’m struggling to display thumbnails for related posts. I’m using a custom code to display related posts (by category) with their thumbnails. It currently works by grabbing the first image in the post, creating a thumbnail and displaying that. This works great and I want to keep this part, but I need it to be modified so that if the post contains no images it grabs the featured image for that post instead and displays that. I know this is kinda complex, is it possible?
This is the code I currently use to grab related posts and display their thumbnails.

<?php $orig_post = $post;
						global $post;
						$categories = get_the_category($post->ID);
						if ($categories) {
						$category_ids = array();
						foreach($categories as $individual_category) $category_ids[] = $individual_category->term_id;

						$args=array(
						'category__in' => $category_ids,
						'post__not_in' => array($post->ID),
						'posts_per_page'=> 2, // Number of related posts that will be shown.
						'caller_get_posts'=>1
						);

						$my_query = new wp_query( $args );
						if( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
						echo '<div id="related-posts"><h2>Related News</h2><ul>';
						while( $my_query->have_posts() ) {
						$my_query->the_post();?>

						<li><div class="relatedthumb"><a href="<? the_permalink()?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">

						<?php

						$args = array(
							'post_type'   => 'attachment',
							'numberposts' => -1,
							'post_status' => null,
							'post_parent' => $post->ID,
							'exclude'     => get_post_thumbnail_id()
							);

						$attachments = get_posts( $args );

						if ( $attachments ) {
							foreach ( $attachments as $attachment ) {
								//echo apply_filters( 'the_title', $attachment->post_title );
								the_attachment_link( $attachment->ID, false );
							}
						}

						?>

						</a></div>
						<div class="relatedcontent">
						<h3><a href="<? the_permalink()?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
						Posted <?php the_time('F j, Y') ?>
						</div>
						</li>
						<?
						}
						echo '</ul></div>';
						}
						}
						$post = $orig_post;
						wp_reset_query(); ?>

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.