US Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Sunday he felt "great" after a health scare that forced him to check into a hospital last week.
While he declined to tell ABC television what his doctor's diagnosis was, Giuliani said tests had shown no return of the prostate cancer that forced him out to drop out of the race for New York senator in 2000. The episode came just two weeks before the launch of the state-by-state contests to choose nominees for the 2008 presidential election, and it put a focus on Giuliani's position as national frontrunner for his party's nod.
"I'm back on the trail, ready to go, hail and hearty, feeling great and you know actually reassured by the fact that I had so many different tests and they all came back 100 percent," the former New York mayor said.
Giuliani, whose lead in national polls has been slipping, promised a full account of last week's health scare after Tuesday's Christmas holiday, but told ABC's "This Week" that he felt "terrific."
He said he had suffered a bad headache that got steadily worse on Wednesday, leading him to order his plane bound for New York to turn around several minutes after taking off from St Louis, Missouri. "It was a terrible headache, I mean all day - it got worse all day," Giuliani said. He said it worsened in the evening, when he was speaking to a rally with a local lawmaker in St Louis, after which he planned to fly back to his home in New York. "My staff was very concerned so we turned around. I actually made that decision. (We) were only six or seven minutes out. It actually made no sense to get on the plane," he said.
The presidential contender said he did not black out, and the next day his aides said that he had had "flu-like symptoms." Giuliani said physicians had "checked everything."
"I'm a cancer survivor. So there's always the issue of cancer," he said. But he said a test that looks for prostate cancer had come back "negligible," and that his doctor in New York had advised him to take aspirin but no prescription medicine. "After Christmas he can address this himself," Giuliani said. "He's going to put out everything that's appropriate to show that I'm in good health."
With his national lead slipping, and his rivals leading in several of the first states to vote on nominees, Giuliani said he had returned to full-scale campaigning.
The prostate cancer diagnosis in 2000 forced Giuliani to drop out of the race for New York senator, a move which cleared the way for an easy victory by Hillary Clinton, who is now the frontrunner for the Democratic party's presidential nomination.
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