Jimmy Carter reflects on life as cancer spreads

Carter has melanoma that has spread to his liver and brain, he announced August 20.

The former president announced he has melanoma and that it has spread to his liver and brain. After leaving the White House, he established the Carter Foundation and has traveled the world working on issues like healthcare and global democracy.

It’s a serious situation but not one without hope, thanks to advances in treatment options, like immunotherapy.

“He is at peace and at ease with whatever comes”. Analysts and historians generally chalk up Carter’s loss to a lacklustre economy and the Iranian hostage crisis.

JIMMY CARTER: We talked about this when I was 80.

Wearing a dark blue jacket, red tie and blue jeans, Carter was steady as he walked alone into a conference room and sat at a table with a microphone.

“I stayed that night and the next day until I came up to Emory”.

He said he was pleased that he did not become angry or despaired. He said he was “ready for a new adventure” and felt his life’s work was not done. I’ve had an exciting, gratifying existence.

Carter repeatedly said he is now “at ease” with the diagnosis, and is sustained by his family and religious faith.

Thursday’s radiation is the first of four treatments scheduled over the next few months. Now, Carter said his cancer treatment will be his top priority.

“Right now, I think the prospects are more dismal than any time I remember in the last 50 years”, Carter said. But a skin specialist at the University of Kansas Hospital says it’s possible that Carter’s original melanoma hasn’t been found because the spot on his skin disappeared.

Earlier in the week, he received an injection of a newly approved drug to help his immune system seek out and destroy cancer cells that may develop anywhere else in his body.

And they did a biopsy and found that it was, indeed, cancer and it was melanoma. [It could mean] longterm life with a good quality of life.

“My roots are there and my closest friends are there and our little church is there which is important to me”, said Carter.

She told Jones that the Carter Center is well prepared to continue the former president’s mission as he pulls back and deals with his illness. His three siblings and father died from it. There has so far been no suggestion that cancer has spread to Mr. Carter’s pancreas, however.

We would pick the Camp David accords, which have preserved the peace between Israel and Egypt since they were signed in 1978, but perhaps we quibble.

After losing re-election to Republican Ronald Reagan, he went on to champion wide-ranging worldwide humanitarian efforts.

New medications, including the drug pembroluzimab, with which Carter will be treated, aim to keep the immune system from turning off. Lichtenfeld said such therapies, first presented in 2010, were the first new drugs for melanoma since the 1970s.

His greatest accomplishment was marrying his wife, Rosalynn, he said. They live in rural Plains, Georgia, about 150 miles (240 km) south of Atlanta.