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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter Officially Announces He’s Cancer Free

By Janice Malcolm
Published on: 04:55 PST, Dec 6, 2015

Former United States President Jimmy Carter is having a great start to the week, and made an announcement on Sunday that invites the world to share in his good news. Jimmy Carter is cancer free.

The 91-year-old former president officially made the announcement at the beginning of a Sunday School class he was teaching at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. A fellow church member and close friend of Carter’s advised the media of the former President’s location when he delivered the news that he was now free of his brain cancer.

Allegedly, there were about 350 persons in attendance at the class that Carter was teaching at Maranatha, and a lot of them were visitors to the church. The close friend, Jill Stuckey, spoke of the audience’s reaction to the announcement.

“He said he got a scan this week and the cancer was gone. The church, everybody here, just erupted in applause.”

Jimmy Carter, was president from 1977 to 1981, and BBC News also reminded us that in 2002, Carter also won a Nobel Peace Prize. He first spoke of his diagnosis back in August, saying that four small melanoma lesions had been found on his brain by his doctors. This news came to Carter right after he had undergone the removal of a mass attached to his liver. The lesion turned out to be melanoma also, and in order to save the organ, Carter ended up with about ten percent of the organ having to be removed. Initially it was thought that the cancer was confined to his liver, but the very same day the doctors did the removal, an MRI showed that the cancer had also spread to four places in his brain.

A treatment plan that involved drastically cutting back on his schedule had already been formulated, and would involve him receiving four different drug treatments as well as radiation therapy.

Later on in the month of August, Carter began taking Keytruda, which is a new drug that had proven to be very promising with other patients. At the time, Jimmy Carter said that though he hoped for the best, he was prepared for anything. In fact, as a previous Inquisitr piece pointed out, Jimmy Carter felt that even if his life was to come to an end, he was actually completely at peace with all that he had accomplished.

Since that treatment began, the news coming from the Carter camp has all been positive. Last month, the nonprofit organization human rights organization Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, had set up after he left the presidency, the Carter Center, released a statement advising that the 39th president was responding well to his treatment. The cancer had not spread.

“President Carter has received good news from his Winship Cancer Institute doctors. They tell him that recent tests have shown there is no evidence of new malignancy, and his original problem is responding well to treatment. Further tests will continue.”

The news that Carter was now cancer free first appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), and news of the family’s natural relief was included. One of the ex-president’s grandsons even made a joke about knowing that Carter would have to survive because “he wasn’t really human.”

Despite his diagnosis, Carter maintained a fairly active schedule, even throughout his cancer treatment regime. Just days after making the initial announcement that he had brain cancer, he was back teaching his Sunday School class. Jimmy Carter even kept up his work with Habitat for Humanity, having worked closely with the organization since 1984 and continued to participate in the building of houses.

[Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images]

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