Rarely is it said that someone is lucky to have had cancer. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court might be one such person.
Justice Ginsburg was treated successfully for colon cancer in 1999 and is examined each year at the National Institutes of Health, where in January 2009 a routine CT scan revealed a very small cancer in the center of her pancreas.
While the life expectancy for most people found to have pancreatic cancer is usually a year or less, Justice Ginsburg has apparently been well after she recovered from surgery to remove the tumor, about the smallest that can be detected by a CT scan — one centimeter, or less than half an inch, wide.