But Carter delayed surgery in order to complete his book tour for his memoir published this year, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety“.
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By the end of June, doctors were certain that he would need to have an operation on his liver. Doctors said the small spots were about 2 millimeters in size.
But so far, melanoma has been the cancer most transformed by the wave of new immunotherapies, with some patients far outliving the typical prognosis. Stage IV means it spread via the bloodstream or through the lymphatic system to other areas of the body.
Melanomas can be cured if caught early but become more unsafe once they spread.
In a press conference held to discuss the details of the former president’s cancer diagnosis, Carter was asked if he wished he had done anything differently as president. Some 98% of melanomas do start with the skin, and lessening your exposure to ultraviolet light does lower your risk of skin cancer. He says he will cut back on some work and his schedule. The disease was discovered by doctors following his liver procedure. He said he’d have a total of four radiation treatments at 3-week intervals.
The radiation he’ll likely receive will target just his tumors – not his whole brain – so he’ll come out of that unscathed, too.
Leaders really are made from tougher stuff than most of us. He went to North Korea to help defuse nuclear tensions, and he negotiated a settlement that averted a U.S. invasion of Haiti. The Food and Drug Administration rapidly approved the “breakthrough” drug last year for patients with advanced melanoma who have exhausted other therapies, saying it represented a substantial improvement over existing treatments.
He said that if he had one wish for the rest of his life it would be that he gets to see peace in the Middle East but bemoaned the fact that that goal seems “more dismal than any time I remember in the last 50 years”. The drugs aim to get the immune system to fight the tumor directly. But he said his time in the White House gave him the contacts and prestige necessary to carry out his Nobel-prize winning post-presidential vocation.
He said the best thing he ever did was marry his wife Rosalynn, and that it was also an honour to have served as president.
“In general, melanoma accounts for 10% of brain metastases”, added Ahmad Tarhini, associate professor of medicine and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “That’s the pinnacle of my life”, he said.
“This is not a eulogy in any way”, Jason Carter said. Sometimes, he said, that is almost as big a factor in outcome as age.
With his father and his three siblings having died of pancreatic cancer, the disease has long been a concern for Carter.
What impact this treatment will have on his life going forward is up for debate.
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The 90-year-old ex-president, whose volunteer activities have ranged from building houses to monitoring elections to helping develop impoverished nations, said the illness will force him to cut back “fairly dramatically” on his work with the Carter Center, though he will continue to raise money for the center and oversee some of its activities.
