The 86-year-old Ginsburg took a break from the court after undergoing surgery to remove cancerous nodules from her lungs in December 2018, but returned to the Court in February of this year. She also fought colorectal cancer in 1999 and had a stent implanted in her heart to open a blocked artery in 2014.
"There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer [in 2009], who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months," she told National Public Radio. "That senator, whose name I've forgotten, is now himself dead and I am very much alive."
She was referring to Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher who served two terms as a Republican US Senator from Kentucky between 1999 and 2011. In 2009 Bunning said in a speech that Ginsburg had "bad cancer. The kind that you don't get better from ... Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live" with pancreatic cancer. He later apologized for his comments in a statement which misspelt Ginsburg's name.
Bunning passed away in May 2017 at the age of 85, months after suffering a stroke.
When asked on Tuesday how she managed to combine her work with fighting cancer, she told NPR, "The work is really what saved me because I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of opinion, and I knew it had to get done.”
Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by former President Bill Clinton in 1993 to replace retiring Justice Byron R. White. She was the second woman to be confirmed to the high court following Sandra Day O'Connor.
