U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is “resting comfortably” after having undergone a nonsurgical medical procedure and is expected to be released from hospital by the end of the week, the Supreme Court announced late Wednesday.
The 87-year-old justice underwent a minimally invasive procedure to “revise a bile duct stent” at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
“According to her doctors, stent revisions are common occurrences and the procedure, performed using endoscopy and medical imaging guidance, was done to minimize the risk of future infection,” the court said in a statement.
The stent was originally placed in August 2019 when she was treated for a cancerous tumor on her pancreas.
Ginsburg on July 15 underwent a procedure at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to clean the stent. At the time, she had gone to the hospital after experiencing fever and chills, and the case was a suspected infection for which she was placed on intravenous antibiotics.
On July 17, the justice announced that she is receiving treatment for liver cancer via chemotherapy and that she was tolerating the treatment well and it has so far been effective in reducing the lesions on her liver. While she has faced different types of cancers, it was the first time she has developed liver cancer.
She has been treated previously four times for cancer. The most recent was pancreatic cancer in August 2019 for which she underwent radiation therapy. The other cases were in December 2018 when the justice had two cancerous growths removed from her left lung, and prior treatments for pancreatic cancer in 2009 and colon cancer in 1999.
Ginsburg is the oldest justice on the nine-member court, and her health is closely watched because a Supreme Court vacancy could give Republican President Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a third justice to the court. The court has a 5-4 conservative majority, with two justices appointed by Trump—Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017.
Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court in 1993 as an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton. The liberal justice said she would like to serve until she’s 90 if her health allows.
Reuters contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times
