Ruth Bader Ginsburg still has work to do — and she expects to see it through.

While critics and supporters alike have focused on the Supreme Court justice’s health following her three cancer diagnoses over the years (and fracturing three ribs last fall), the 86-year-old assured in a new NPR interview released on Wednesday that she is “very much alive.”

In fact, she’s survived at least one of her biggest critics, recalling a senator who predicted she’d be dead in six months following one diagnosis.

“ ‘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. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead, and I am very much alive.’ ” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

And Ginsburg credited her career, including a quarter-century on the Supreme Court, for helping her to carry on.

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

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She also reflected on her late husband, Martin “Marty” Ginsburg, who toughed out her 1999 color cancer diagnosis and the 2009 pancreatic cancer diagnosis with her. But he died in 2010, so she’s weathered her more recent lung cancer diagnosis with their children and grandchildren. In fact, she recalled a time when he ripped out her IV while she was getting a blood transfusion during cancer treatment because he noticed one of the antigens didn’t match.

“I might not have lived if he hadn’t been there,” she said, adding, “I miss him every morning.”

“ ‘The work is really what saved me.’ ” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

While Ginsburg has been called a “liberal lion,” she had strong words for Democratic presidential candidates who want to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court to limit the power of the current conservative majority, however.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’ “

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Ginsburg gave the NPR interview following the private funeral for Justice John Paul Stevens on Tuesday, who died on July 16 at the age of 99. He had served on the Supreme Court for 35 years, stepping down when he was 90. Ginsburg said that she had spoken with him about her plans for remaining on the bench at least as long as his he did during a trip to Portugal the week that he died.

“I said that my dream is that I will stay at the court as long as he did,” she said. “And his immediate response was, ‘Stay longer!’ “