Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced Wednesday that he has cancer and will be undergoing treatment at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta.
Carter, 90, said the disease was discovered during recent liver surgery to remove “a small mass” and that the cancer “is now in other parts of my body.”
“I will be rearranging my schedule as necessary so I can undergo treatment by physicians at Emory Healthcare,” Carter said in a statement on the Carter Center website. “A more complete public statement will be made when facts are known, possibly next week.”
Carter currently is the second-oldest living former president, and he recently release an autobiography titled “A Full Life.” His liver surgery had “proceeded without issues” and he was expected to make a full recovery, according to a statement from the Carter Center last week.
Carter’s brother, Billy, and his two sisters died of pancreatic cancer, as did his father. His mother died of breast cancer. In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Carter ruminated on why so many in his family had suffered from the disease.
“I’m deeply religious, I’m a fatalist, I’m 82 years old and I’ve had a good life,” he said then. In a recent interview on PBS NewsHour, he said his family members all smoked cigarettes but he never did, suggesting that might have been a “triggering device” for genetic causes of the disease in them.
© 2015, The Washington Post
