Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter shared some good news during his regular Sunday School class at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia: He no longer needs cancer treatment.
His announcement came just less than seven months after he revealed that he had been diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to his brain, ABC News reported.
Carter, 91, started his lesson with an update about his health. He said he received an MRI that lasted for more than two hours.
"And then the doctors determined that I didn't need any more treatment," Carter happily shared. "So I'm not going to have any more treatment."
Carter's audience cheered after hearing the good news.
Meanwhile, his spokeswoman Deanna Congileo said in an e-mail sent on Sunday that his doctors will still continue to perform scans just to make sure that cancer cells have not returned. Congileo added that Carter will "resume treatment if necessary."
When sought for a comment, the spokesman from Emory University's Winship Cancer Institute, where Carter has been treated, declined to give any, citing patient privacy rules.
Carter announced a marked improvement on his health last December. "My most recent MRI brain scan did not reveal any signs of the original cancer spots nor any new ones. I will continue to receive regular three-week immunotherapy treatments of pembrolizumab," Carter said then, according to CNN.
He first found out that he had four spots of cancer cells spread to his brain back in August 2015, and he was quoted as saying that his fate "is in the hands of God, whom I worship."
But just three days after disclosing that he had cancer, Carter resumed his Sunday school duties. The only difference was the church attendance, which ballooned in size since people flocked to his church just to see him preach.
"Well, I always explain to the class where I've been the past couple of weeks," he had told the class back then. "I missed two lessons because toward the end of May (and) first of June it was found that I had cancer, so they removed part of my liver. But then we had another MRI and it showed I have four places in my brain."
