Former President Jimmy Carter announced that his doctors have found four small melanoma lesions in his brain.
The Georgia native spoke candidly and with his good nature and humor for over 30 minutes in a press conference on Thursday. Carter said he felt at ease and will fight the cancer, beginning with a course of radiation and intensive therapy to combat it, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He says "his plan is one of hope and acceptance. Hope for good, accept what comes."
"I get my first radiation treatment for the melanoma in my brain this afternoon," Carter said during the news conference where he also said he would cut back on his work with the Carter Center, according to FOX News.
The 90-year-old said physicians were first alerted in May when he was fighting a cold and cut short an election-monitoring trip to Guyana. Emory University Hospital physicians discovered a lesion on his liver, which they removed in an operation earlier this month that took about 10 percent of the organ. The same afternoon as the operation, an MRI of his head and neck revealed the lesions in his brain, according to the New York Times.
After the Aug. 3 procedure, which Carter's office described at the time as elective, doctors concluded that the cancer was also in his brain. Carter, whose wife, Rosalynn, sat nearby on Thursday, said that his doctors had scheduled four radiation treatments at three-week intervals, and that he would receive another treatment intravenously.
Carter said the cancer has not spread to his pancreas, although he has a family history of pancreatic cancer; according to HNGN in a previous story. His three siblings all died of pancreatic cancer by 1990. The same disease played a part in the deaths of both of his parents.
