Former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, formerly Tammy Faye Bakker, posted Tuesday on her website (service is currently unavailable) a message about her health.

Messner, 65, reports that doctors have stopped treating her cancer. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996 and announced in 2004 that the disease had spread to her lungs.

“I am down weight-wise to 65 pounds, and look like a scarecrow,” the Charlotte resident shared on her site. “I need God’s miracle to swallow. I look at young people and wish with all my heart for just one day of ‘feeling great.’”

Messner, whose daughter and daughter’s friends are taking care of her while her husband, Roe Messner, is off building churches, went on to write, “the doctors have stopped trying to treat the cancer and so now it’s up to God and my faith. And that’s enough!”

Divorced from Jim Bakker in 1992 while he was serving a sentence for financial fraud, Messner is half of the famous Bakker pair that founded a Christian retreat in Fort Mill, S.C., and built a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire. She also starred on the VH1 reality show Surreal Life and is the author of several books, among them her recent I Will Survive…and You Will Too!

Debra Brewer, a women is to sue the Ministry of Defence for £75,000, claiming that hugging her dockyard worker father caused her cancer.

Debra Brewer has been diagnosed with the asbestos-related condition mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer. The 47-year-old’s father, Phillip Northmore, worked as a lagger at Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth for five years in the 1960s when she was a child.

An inquest into his death in August 2006 found he had died from small cell lung cancer, which was linked to asbestos.

Mrs Brewer said she remembered he would always arrive home from work covered in dust but as a young child she never imagined that as she played with her dad, the dust he was coated in could be life-threatening.

John Messham, industrial disease specialist at Debra’s solicitor Bond Pearce, said: “Mesothelioma causes a great deal of suffering to its victims and their families. Asbestos diseases are potentially fatal and so it vital that such cases are dealt with efficiently but also with sympathy and compassion.

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