Justice Ginsburg Faces Tough Battle Against Pancreatic Cancer
Seattle – The news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer has opened the gauntlet for speculation as to who may take her place. Observers say the current court’s make-up of four justices who are left-leaning, four who are to the right, and one in the middle leaning right is not expected to change.
Ginsburg, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, and has served 15 years on the high court, is currently the only woman on the court, and she leans to the left on most issues. It is expected that President Obama would be likely to appoint a woman to replace her, who is likely to be a liberal and will probably be chosen from the federal appeals court, like Ginsburg was. Various websites and periodicals are already posting long lists of potential candidates.
The 75-year old Ginsburg had surgery Thursday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She had a small cancerous tumor removed from the center of her pancreas. She successfully battled colon cancer ten years ago. A court spokeswoman says that Ginsburg has plans to come back to the court by February 23 in time for three days of oral arguments.
The good news for Judge Ginsburg is that doctors appear to be cautiously optimistic about her odds of beating this cancer. Although pancreatic cancer is considered one of the deadliest known to man, there is some reason for optimism because her tumor was only about 1 centimeter long. That’s very small, almost the smallest that is detectable by a CT scan.
Dr. Joan Bull, a professor of oncology at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, says that the size of the tumor, discovered during a routine checkup in late January, suggests that the cancer was caught at a very early stage, possibly before it had a chance to spread. If so, it would set Ginsburg apart from the 60 percent to 70 percent of pancreatic cancer patients whose disease is caught after it has spread to other areas of the body.
Still, other doctors say it is possible that the tumor located by doctors is an adenocarcinoma, which is the most common kind of tumor found in the pancreas and also the most deadly.
Short term, Ginsburg’s illness may also affect the Supreme Court itself. Much of it will depend on the course of her post-operative recovery and treatment. There has been talk that Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter are considering leaving the Court, but if they are, they will almost certainly put those plans on hold until Ginsburg’s status is known.
It is commonly assumed that the justices of the Supreme Court do not want more than one judge leaving per term because of the extra burden it places on the court. That assumption may have been tested in 2005, when Sandra Day O’Connor announced in July that she was retiring, and then William Rehnquist suddenly died in September.
Why do journalists insist on the ‘battle’ description when describing how patients deal with this disease? Pure laziness and it assumes that eventually the same writer can post that so-and-so ‘lost the battle’ as if there was some level of nobility involved. There is no warrior ethos here: you get cancer, you deal with it, and squeeze out joy in the moments left. You don’t beat it.. With a little luck, you survive it. Try a little chemo sometime writer if you doubt my motive.