Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Battle With Multiple Cancers Spanned Decades
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a fierce fighter for women’s rights, died in her home in Washington D.C. Friday. She was 87.
“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Ginsburg passed due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the Court confirmed. But this wasn’t her only bout with the disease. Ginsburg’s first cancer diagnosis actually happened by accident 21 years ago, six years after she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton. Here’s everything you need to know about her cancer journey.
September 1999: colon cancer
Ginsburg’s first brush with cancer occurred two decades ago when she was 66. The justice went to the hospital to be treated for an abdominal infection when her doctors discovered stage 2 colon cancer, The New York Times reported. In this stage, the cancer is fairly treatable as it has not yet spread into nearby lymph nodes, per the American Cancer Society (ACS). The five-year survival rate for localized colon cancer is 90% when caught in these early stages.
Ginsburg had a small tumor that had not spread to other parts of her body, but her sigmoid colon—a lower section of the large intestine—was removed. Doctors called her “lucky” at the time but cautioned the possibility of “microscopic spread” that isn’t always present in early biopsies. She continued to work through her hospitalization.
January 2009: pancreatic cancer
At 75, Ginsburg was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer during a routine annual screening, NPR reported. While pancreatic cancer often has a poor prognosis—the disease is often diagnosed in later, hard-to-treat stages due to its obscure symptoms—experts remained optimistic for the justice, as the tumor discovered in the center of her pancreas was only 1 centimeter long.
“Justice Ginsburg had no symptoms prior to the incidental discovery of the lesion during a routine annual checkup in late January at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland,” the Supreme Court confirmed in a statement. She quickly underwent surgery a month later, and continued to find passion in her work.
November 2018: lung cancer
After suffering a fall in her office, tests confirmed that Ginsburg had fractured three ribs on her left side, the Court said. Doctors once again stumbled upon something more serious: lung cancer. More specifically, two cancerous nodules in her left lung. In December 2018, the 85-year-old Justice underwent a pulmonary lobectomy, an operation in which a single lobe (a.k.a. section) in the lung is removed. The right lung is composed of three lobes, while the left has two.
Her surgery went smoothly, and the Court confirmed “there was no evidence of any remaining disease” or “evidence of disease elsewhere in the body.” This time around, she did miss a few weeks of work as she recovered.
July 2019: pancreatic cancer returns
Just one year later, Ginsburg’s doctors found another localized tumor on her pancreas during a routine blood test. It was seen as an abnormality initially and confirmed with a biopsy. When a cancer recurs, it can be found where it was initially located or in a different part of the body, the ACS says.
A month later, the Court stated that the 86-year-old had finished a three-week course of radiation therapy and had “tolerated treatment well.” In true RBG fashion, she had returned to work at the Supreme Court the same day after receiving her final treatment, The Washington Post reported.
January 2020: “cancer free”
Following her intensive treatment, Ginsburg was feeling optimistic despite her recent health scares. “I’m cancer free. That’s good,” she told CNN earlier this year.
May 2020: liver lesions
Shortly after her radiation therapy, Ginsburg started a course of chemotherapy to treat a cancer recurrence after immunotherapy didn’t work, she wrote in a statement, revealing that a “periodic scan followed by a biopsy” had detected lesions on her liver.
“The chemotherapy course, however, is yielding positive results,” the statement read. “My most recent scan on July 7 indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease. I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment.”
The 87-year-old justice, and the eldest member of the Court, would continue bi-weekly chemo treatments and insisted that she was “able to maintain an active daily routine.”
“I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam,” she wrote. “I remain fully able to do that.”
September 2020: fatal cancer complications
Further details about the complications that lead to Ginsburg’s death have not been released. While her cancer battle was long, she was a fighter and lived an extraordinary life for two decades after her initial diagnosis.
“This is a patient whose cancer has been an outlier,” James M. Cleary, M.D., Ph.D., an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, told The Washington Post in July. He added that Ginsburg’s journey had given his own cancer patients “a lot of hope.”
Support from readers like you helps us do our best work. Go here to subscribe to Prevention and get 12 FREE gifts. And sign up for our FREE newsletter here for daily health, nutrition, and fitness advice.
You Might Also Like
