On February 18, 2023, the Carter Center issued a statement that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who has recently been hospitalized frequently, decided today not to receive medical intervention, and he will receive hospice care at home and spend the rest of his life with his family.
Hospice care is the cessation of active treatment of terminally ill patients, but on relieving their pain and other symptoms, focusing on their personal wishes and quality of life, so that they can walk without pain.
Carter and the autobiography he wrote
At 98 years old, Carter is the longest-living president in the United States. There are a few things that impressed me about Carter.
Carter was born in Plains, a small town in Georgia. Carter's father was very hardworking, and from morning to night, he required everyone in the family to work, even horses, to earn their own rations. Carter had always had special respect for his father. The people who helped Carter's family farm were black, so Carter always played closely with black children, and when he grew up, he firmly opposed segregation.
Carter worked as a naval engineer after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. He once came home from vacation and told his parents something. When the submarine was moored in Bermuda, a grand ball was organized for the young navy, but black soldiers were not invited, so Carter and they did not go to the ball to show their opposition. His father, who supported apartheid, went silently to another room without saying a word.
Carter served in the Navy for seven years. In 1953, Carter's father died, which hit Carter hard, and the family's farm was in urgent need of management, so Carter was discharged from the army and returned home to become a peanut farmer.
The Carters helped poverty in Africa
Medically, Carter had a clear family history of cancer. His father and three siblings all died of extremely malignant pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty or sixty. His mother also had breast cancer.
Carter wrote in his memoirs that his family was the only one in the United States who had died of four family members due to pancreatic cancer, and the NIH began regularly examining all members of his family. Carter did CT twice a year to screen for pancreatic cancer, but doctors decided the CT rays were too large and replaced them with MRI. When he reached his 80s, regular imaging tests were canceled.
When my children were young, I told them the story of Carter's family, and the child asked: Could it be because of pesticides sprinkled in the ground? The Carter family lived next to a cotton field.
I said, "No, because the neighbors are farmers, but they don't get this cancer."
Of the cancer, Carter himself explained, "The only difference between me and my father and younger siblings is that I have never smoked a single cigarette. My father smoked all the time, and so did my siblings. ”
This makes sense, and studies have found that in addition to genetic factors, smoking is also one of the risk factors for pancreatic cancer.
In a 2007 interview with The New York Times, Carter said he was 82 years old and not worried about cancer, but he was worried about the risk of cancer in his four children, because some of the children smoked, which made him sad, and he hated cigarettes the most.
In short, Carter was extremely lucky to have perfectly escaped his family's pancreatic cancer.
Carter lived a long life, but was found to have extremely malignant melanoma at the age of 90.
On August 3, 2015, Carter underwent surgery to remove a 2.5 cm liver tumor, and the postoperative pathological diagnosis was found to be metastatic melanoma, and Carter had stage 4 cancer.
Melanoma mortality rates were high, but Carter was fortunate that shortly after the approval of the K drug (Keytruda) by the FDA to kill cancer cells through T cells, Carter began immunotherapy.
Carter wrote in the book that one day he and his wife were on their way home from the hospital when a doctor called and found metastatic melanoma in his brain. Metastases appear on imaging as four small dots, each about 2 millimeters, and the brain is one of the most common sites of melanoma spread.
On August 20 of that year, Carter, who was almost 91 years old, said at a press conference that he may only have a few weeks left, but he felt surprisingly relaxed about the future and that he was in God's hands. "I've had a wonderful life, I've had thousands of friends, I've had an exciting, adventurous, fulfilling life," he said. ”
Doctors immediately began giving Carter high-precision, high-intensity "stereotactic radiosurgery" to treat metastatic cancer in the brain. Immunotherapy and radiotherapy went hand in hand, and his treatment was particularly good, and after less than four months of checkup, the tumor had completely disappeared, and the 91-year-old Carter miraculously recovered!
Carter's success story made many patients realize the magic of immunotherapy as a new treatment, and at the time there was a story titled "I Want Jimmy Carter's Drug: Patients Clamor for the President's Cancer Drug."
Pancreatic cancer and melanoma are both extremely malignant cancers. Carter escaped the fate of his family in his early years, and after the age of 90, he was cured of cancer through advances in medicine.
Carter may have been a mediocre president, but he couldn't help but say he was a miracle in medicine.