Pik Botha (72), long-time minister of foreign affairs in the apartheid government, is free of further cancer, preliminary tests have shown.
Unitas hospital spokesperson Karin Lindeque confirmed this on Wednesday afternoon after speaking to his surgeon, Heinrich Schwalb.
The former minister underwent a two-hour operation on Tuesday during which two cancerous tumours were removed.
In the hospital’s coffee shop, Botha’s wife, Ina, expressed deep relief at the news.
”His glands [around the removed section of colon] are clean, which means my husband has a new lease on life.
”It’s wonderful news. Since he heard the news, his spirits are soaring,” she said.
Botha is nonetheless very tired and in need of further rest in Unitas’s intensive-care unit.
Visitors are limited to family only, Ina said.
”I know they are very well meaning, but he needs the rest.”
She joked that Heine van der Walt, Pik Botha’s Harley-Davidson-riding doctor and long-standing friend, said to him: ”Oom Pik, we can now put away a five-year-old bottle of whisky and drink it when it’s 10 years old.”
Ina said: ”It’s a wake-up call. You’ve got to appreciate one another every single day.”
The former minister was diagnosed with the tumours last week and first had to undergo tests to see if he was ready for an operation, while taking medication that thinned his blood.
In 1998, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which was successfully treated. That same year he underwent a heart bypass. — Sapa