Cancer treatments stopped for ex-televangelist Tammy Faye

Disgraced former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner said doctors have stopped treating her cancer and “now it’s up to God and my faith.”

Messner, 65, is best known for co-hosting The PTL Club, a televangelism program that was successful in the 1970s and 1980s, with her then husband, Jim Bakker.

She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996 and the disease spread to her lungs in 2004.

In a farewell letter to fans posted Tuesday on her website, Messner thanked “faithful friends” for sending flowers, cards and gifts, while offering words of comfort to others suffering from disease.

“To those of you who are suffering as I … ‘don’t give up!’ Make up your mind you’re going to live,” she wrote.

Messner said her current husband, Roe Messner, is busy building churches, but her daughter, Tammy Sue, is watching over her in their home in Charlotte, N.C.
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She said she now weights 65 pounds and friends fear she will have a fall.

“I look at young people and wish with all my heart for just one day of ‘feeling great,’” she wrote.

Bakker resigned from his television ministry when an affair he had with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, was made public.

He was later investigated for financial fraud and the PTL ministry went bankrupt. Bakker and Messner still haven’t cleared a shared debt with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Messner divorced Bakker in 1992 and married Messner, a contractor, who also served time for bankruptcy fraud.

She appeared on the 2004 VH1 reality television series The Surreal Life, in which she stayed in a Los Angeles house with a porn star, a rapper and several actors.

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