Chris Evert has emerged victorious — and this time, it was off the tennis court docket.
The tennis legend has revealed she is “cancer-free” in an op-ed printed on ESPN.com Tuesday.
The 18-time Grand Slam winner was recognized with ovarian most cancers in Nov. 2021 — a analysis that echoed the dying of her sister Jeanne, who died in Feb. 2020 at age 62.
However due to the “genetic street map my sister left behind,” Evert says docs have been in a position to detect the illness early — that means that there’s now a 90% likelihood the most cancers “won’t ever come again.”
“Jeanne wasn’t BRCA optimistic, however genetic testing revealed she had a BRCA-1 variant that was of ‘unsure significance,’” Evert wrote.
“I obtained a name saying that they had reclassified her BRCA variant — the importance was now not unsure, it was now very clearly pathogenic, and we must be examined. I used to be shocked, I didn’t even know that was potential.”
Evert revealed she was recognized with the identical BRCA-1 variant of the illness that killed her sister.
“It is just due to the genetic street map my sister left behind and the facility of scientific progress that we caught my most cancers early sufficient to do one thing about it,” she wrote, saying the state of affairs would have been way more critical if docs didn’t discover the most cancers sooner.
“As an alternative, I used to be recognized with Stage 1 ovarian most cancers, and I instantly started six rounds of chemotherapy,” she added.
Evert says she “held my breath” whereas ready for the pathology outcomes.
“Fortunately, the report got here again clear and clear, and my danger of growing breast most cancers has been decreased by greater than 90%,” she wrote, including that she has another surgical procedure left to finish.
“As relieved as I shall be to get to the opposite facet of this, I’ll all the time have a heavy coronary heart. I’ll by no means heal from shedding Jeanne, and I’ll by no means take with no consideration the reward she gave me within the course of,” she went on. “My sister’s journey saved my life, and I hope by sharing mine, I simply may save someone else’s.”
Throughout her glittering profession on the court docket, Evert reached No. 1 within the WTA rankings and was inducted into the Worldwide Corridor of Fame in 1995.
This story first appeared within the New York Submit and was republished with permission.
