The broken ribs turned out to be a blessing, as fractures go: After Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fell and injured herself on November 7, doctors discovered two nodules on her left lung. Friday, Ginsburg underwent surgery to have these cancerous growths removed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
“There was no evidence of any remaining disease” after the surgery, according to Ginsburg’s thoracic surgeon, Dr. Valerie W. Rusch. Through a statement released by Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg, Dr. Rusch confirmed that “scans performed before surgery indicated no evidence of disease elsewhere in the body.” Ginsburg plans to be in the hospital for a few days, presumably taking a break from her famously rigorous workout regimen, as she recovers.
As NBC reports, the procedure Ginsberg had, a pulmonary lobectory, “has a high success rate in cases in which lung cancer is caught early.” Dr. John Heymach, chairman of thoracic, head and neck Medical Oncology at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, told NBC News that, though he did not know “the specifics of her case,” it was “possible… that early detection because of those broken ribs saved her life.”
While most people who commented on Ginsberg’s condition did so with compassion — even President Trump wished her “a full and speedy recovery” on Twitter, with correct capitalization and everything — Bill O’Reilly went in, ah, another direction.
“Justice Ginsburg is very ill. Another Justice appointment inevitable and soon,” he tweeted. “Bad news for the left.”
Is now a good time to remind everyone that there are six publicly known settlements involving O’Reilly, five of which are for sexual harassment? One is for verbal abuse. All are worth a total of approximately $45 million. It’s easy to lose track of any individual account in the murderer’s row of #MeToo men that is television news, but O’Reilly has been accused by reporters, producers, and guests on his show of propositioning them for sex and retaliating when he was rebuffed, either through threatening to end their careers or some other form of mistreatment. (Sample dialogue: Telling a woman who wanted to complain about him that she’d “pay so dearly that she’ll wish she’d never been born.”) He’s also been accused of calling those same individuals on the phone while masturbating. That news broke about a month after the story about Fox News CEO and Chairman Roger Ailes’ reported reign of sexual harassment and coercion.
In the wake of these credible reports, O’Reilly was fired from his eponymous show and exiled from Fox News. It is much harder, however, to be exiled from Twitter, so there he remains, sharing the inner workings of his toxic mind with the masses.
Meanwhile, from her hospital bed, Justice Ginsburg cast the decisive vote against the Trump administration’s proposal to prohibit immigrants from seeking asylum.