Earlier this year, King Charles III and Kate Middleton both announced cancer diagnoses within weeks of one another, changing the focus for the royal family’s year drastically. Though the Princess of Wales announced in September that her treatment—“preventative chemotherapy” for an undisclosed form of the disease—had concluded, the king’s journey is still ongoing, palace sources told Sky News.
“His treatment has been moving in a positive direction,” a source told the news outlet. “As a managed condition, the treatment cycle will continue into next year.” The source added that the king is feeling optimistic about the situation.
Dame Laura Lee, the chief executive of cancer support charity Maggie’s, offered SkyNews an explanation for the possible difference between the king and the princess’s respective treatments for their illnesses. “It’s very common for treatment to be ongoing for very long periods of time, as is the treatment that the Princess of Wales went through, which is an intense period of treatment over a year, and then it comes to a point where it’s on an end, and she’s on that recovery from some of the impacts of her treatment,” she said. “There are all sorts of different treatment modalities.”
After the king announced his diagnosis in February, he took a period of time away from his public-facing engagements, though his government work continued behind the scenes. By May, he was back to public duties, spurred on by his desire to attend a May ceremony honoring the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. When he and Queen Camilla made an October trip to Australia and Samoa, their first international tour since his diagnosis, sources told the Daily Mail that he had paused his treatment.
The other recent indication that the king’s treatment was ongoing came from an unlikely place. Following a conversation with Prince William in France earlier this month, president-elect Donald Trump gave the New York Post an update on Charles’s progress. “I asked about [William’s] father and his father is fighting very hard,” Trump said. “He loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad.”