He said he found out about the melanoma after having surgery earlier this year to remove a tumor on his liver.
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For some melanoma patients, and possibly Carter, the path to it may be indelibly inscribed in their genome, bearing a link to another hard form of cancer, said Dr. Craig Devoe, acting chief of hematology and oncology at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System’s Monter Cancer Center.
After Thursday’s radiation, Carter said he will have four more treatments to be scheduled at three-week intervals.
Carter said he was cutting back on his busy Carter Center schedule and following the advice of his doctors.
Carter, speaking slowly and softly and wearing a coat and tie with blue jeans, said he had been overwhelmed with phone calls of support – including outreach from Secretary of State John Kerry and former presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, who called at once. His three siblings all died of pancreatic cancer by 1990.
President Carter said he’s taking the news all in stride.
Carter says he hopes to continue in his professor duties at Emory University and plans to teach Sunday school this weekend in Plains, Ga.
“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes. Obviously I’ll have to defer quite substantially to my doctors who are in charge of the treatment”, Carter said Thursday, saying he’ll get his first radiation treatment this afternoon.
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. “It tends to be more resistant to conventional treatments such as lower doses of radiation and traditional chemotherapy”, he said.
By looking at him, you wouldn’t know he has cancer, but it’s a battle he’s been fighting since May. He said cancer was discovered during an exam that followed a cold he contracted while monitoring elections in Guyana.
He also spoke of his disappointment in the botched effort, toward the end of his presidency, to rescue 52 Americans held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran.
“It’s a wonderful drug”, with relatively few side effects, as opposed to older, traditional chemotherapy drugs that cause hair loss and other symptoms, said Dr. Patrick Hwu, a melanoma expert at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center who helped test it and other immunotherapies. As Carter noted, there are only 11 known cases of Guinea worm left in the world, in Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan, down from 3.6 million people suffering from the disease when the Carter Center began its campaign against it in 1986.
Carter has a history of cancer in his family. In the mean time, “I’m going to cut back fairly dramatically on my obligations at Emory, at the Carter Center“. His mother also suffered from pancreatic cancer.
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Carter said he didn’t tell his wife, Rosalynn Carter, about the suspicious mass until June 15, and he didn’t tell key members of the rest of his family until a biopsy had confirmed it was cancer.
