Ruth Bader Ginsburg Just Shared an Update About Her Health
A week after the Supreme Court announced that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been treated for pancreatic cancer—her fourth cancer diagnosis, and her second of pancreatic cancer—Ginsburg herself decided to share an update about her health. On Saturday (August 31), while appearing at the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., she addressed the crowd with some dry humor.
“As this audience can see I am alive. And I’m on my way to being very well,” she said, according to People.
Ginsburg, who's lovingly nicknamed "The Notorious RBG," also said she'd be "prepared" for when the Supreme Court's next session kicks off again. "We have more than a month yet to go. I will be prepared when the time comes."
“I love my job. It’s the best and the hardest job that I have ever had. It’s kept me going through four cancer battles,” she continued. “Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, I just know that I have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion. I have to somehow surmount whatever is going on in my body and concentrate on the court’s work.”
Ginsburg, who is famously dedicated to her job—last December, she registered her opposition to Trump's asylum reform bill from her hospital bed—spoke in a very similar vein in July. During an interview with NPR, she seemed to reference the late Kentucky senator Jim Bunning, who, after one of her cancer diagnoses, said he thought she'd be dead in a year. "There was a senator, I think it was after the pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I've forgotten, is now himself dead. And I am very much alive," Ginsburg said.
She mentioned then too how her work is what kept her going. "The work is really what saved me because I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of an opinion, and I knew it had to get done," she said in the July NPR interview. "So I had to get past whatever my aches and pains were just to do the job."
Originally Appeared on Glamour
