(CNN) — Former President Jimmy Carter said his future “is in the hands of the God who I worship,” describing his diagnosis Thursday morning, which includes found four spots of melanoma on his brain.
“It is in the hands of the God who I worship,” Carter said at a press conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta, adding he feels “good,” and that he’s following the recommendations of his doctors.
Carter said he had been overwhelmed with phone calls of support including calls from Secretary of State John Kerry and both former president Bushes, who called at once.
Carter said he wasn’t in a lot of discomfort but had some shoulder pain.
“I can’t really anticipate how I’ll be feeling. Obviously I’ll have to defer quite substantially to my doctors who are in charge of the treatment,” Carter said Thursday, saying he’ll get his first radiation treatment this afternoon.
Carter said he would cut back at his work at the Carter Center and at teaching at nearby Emory University.
He added that he was still hoping to do work with Habitat for Humanity work in Nepal, but that it will again depend on his doctor’s guidance.
“I really wanted to go to Nepal to build houses,” Carter said. “This would have been our thirty-third year. I was very hopeful about that. but if it interrupts the treatment regiment I think I need to get the treatment.”
Carter had a “small mass” removed from his liver in an early-August surgical procedure.
He said so far the only places where cancer had been found in his body was in his brain and liver, though he also discussed his family’s history with the disease.
“For a long time my family was the only one on earth that had four people who have died of pancreatic cancer,” he said.
Carter, elected in 1976 and ousted in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan, has a family history of pancreatic cancer — a disease that claimed his father, brother and two sisters. His mother had breast cancer, which later spread to her pancreas.
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