“There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months,” Ginsburg said in a recent interview with NPR. “That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.”

The 86-year-old Supreme Court justice has survived three bouts with cancer. In 1999 she was treated for colon cancer and in 2009 she was treated for pancreatic cancer. Her most recent health scare was in December, when she underwent surgery for lung cancer. She was back in the Supreme Court just weeks after the procedure.

The lung cancer was discovered by chance after tests were conducted to diagnose broken ribs Ginsburg suffered after falling in her office. After the incident, thousands of Twitter users jokingly offered to donate their own ribs to replace her fractured ones. “I will give Ruth Bader Ginsburg all of my ribs if she needs them okay,” one user wrote.

Ginsburg told NPR that it was her work on the high court that helped get her through those illnesses.

“The work is really what saved me because I had to concentrate on reading the briefs, doing a draft of an opinion, and I knew it just had to get done. So I had to get past whatever my aches and pains were just to do the job,” she said.

As Ginsburg struggled with health issues last year, Fox & Friends aired a graphic on the show falsely claiming that she was dead. In the graphic Ginsburg was pictured next to the dates 1933-2019.

The show hosts Steve Doocy and Ainsely Earhardt apologized for the graphic later on in the broadcast. They attributed the mistake to a “technical error in the control room” and repeated that it was nothing more than an “accident.”

Amid her health concerns, Republican lawmakers have made it known that they would move to replace her immediately with a conservative justice. Senator Lindsey Graham said earlier this year that “if there is an opening, whether it’s Ginsburg or anybody else, I will urge the president to nominate a qualified conservative.”

When NPR asked Ginsburg if she was worried the court’s conservative majority would erode the advancements of gender equality (her trademark issue), she replied: “I don’t think there’s going to be any going back to old ways.”

Ginsburg is the Supreme Court’s eldest justice and has served for 25 years after being appointed in 1993 by former President Bill Clinton. The justice is known to fans as the “Notorious RBG” and her life and work has inspired documentaries, books and feature films.