Federal Judiciary

Justice Ginsburg cancer update : no metastatis, lesion proved benign

By Akin Gump Supreme Court Practice Group

The Court’s public information office has just released the following information regarding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

The pancreatic cancer for which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery on February 5 has been determined as TNM Stage 1 by doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.  All lymph nodes proved negative for cancer and no metastasis was found.  In the procedure Dr. Murray Brennan, the attending pancreatic surgeon, removed the Justice’s spleen along with a portion of her pancreas.

Extraordinarily, the approximately 1 cm lesion revealed on a late January CAT scan, the discovery of which led to the February 5 surgery, proved benign.  But in searching the entire pancreas Dr. Brennan identified a previously undetected single, even smaller, tumor which upon examination was found malignant.

Justice Ginsburg was released from Memorial Sloan-Kettering today and is recuperating at home.

Full post as published by SCOTUSBLOG on February 13, 2009 (boomark / email).