Sadly Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not out of the woods yet.
As has been reported the resilient 85-year-old underwent surgery for cancerous nodules on her lungs on Friday.
The Associated Press reported.
After past health scares, she has resumed the exercise routine popularized in a book written by her personal trainer and captured in a Stephen Colbert video. Weeks after cracking three ribs in a fall at the Supreme Court in November, the 85-year-old Ginsburg was asking questions at high court arguments, speaking at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens and being interviewed at screenings of the new movie about her, “On the Basis of Sex.”
Ginsburg will remain in the hospital for a few days, the court said. She has never missed arguments in more than 25 years as a justice. The court next meets on Jan. 7.
While it’s hard to refer to good luck and cancer diagnoses in the same breath, this is the second time for Ginsburg that cancerous growths have been detected at an apparently early stage through unrelated medical tests.
The nodules on her lung were found during X-rays and other tests Ginsburg had after she fractured ribs in a fall in her Supreme Court office on Nov. 7, the court said. In 2009, routine follow-up screening after Ginsburg’s colorectal cancer 10 years earlier detected a lesion on her pancreas. Doctors operated and removed the growth they’d previously spotted, plus a smaller one they hadn’t seen before. The larger growth was benign, while the smaller one was malignant.
Doctors who are not involved in Ginsburg’s care said she may have gotten lucky again, although they caution it is too soon to know.
The Washington Post explained that doctors won’t know if the justice is out of the woods for days.
John Kucharczuk, chief of thoracic surgery in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the kind of surgery Ginsburg underwent is performed only when the doctors are convinced the cancer has not spread to other organs — in that case, the treatment would be a systemic therapy like chemotherapy.
“It’s relatively early stage, and you know that because they proceeded with the lobectomy,” he said. To qualify for that procedure, doctors first make sure through scans that the disease is localized and that the patient “has enough pulmonary reserve to tolerate the operation and have good quality of life afterwards,” he said.
However, he said, the doctors cannot be 100 percent sure that there was no lymph node involvement until after the pathology report is completed in a few days.
If there is cancer in the lymph nodes, then chemo would likely be prescribed, he said. Stephen Liu, a lung cancer expert at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, said Ginsburg may have been lucky.
Lung cancer experts said that, without lymph node involvement, Ginsburg’s odds of being cancer-free five years from now are higher than 80 percent. That falls to about 50 percent if there is node involvement.
