Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.

In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.

“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”

Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”

In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.

She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.

Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.

His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.

Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.

As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”

Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.

Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.

As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.

After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.

Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.