Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has revealed she is fighting breast cancer.
Navratilova said the disease was detected in February after a routine mammogram revealed a cluster in her left breast.
“I cried,” Navratilova, 53, told US magazine People.
“It knocked me on my ass, really. I feel so in control of my life and my body, and then this comes, and it’s completely out of my hands.”
The nine-times Wimbledon champion, who still plays tennis and ice hockey and competes in triathlons, says she is lucky as she had not been going for regular check-ups.
“I went four years between mammograms,” she said.
“I let it slide. Everyone gets busy, but don’t make excuses. I stay in shape and eat right, and it happened to me. Another year and I could have been in big trouble.”
The Czechoslovakian-born star was diagnosed with a non-invasive form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which in her case was confined to the milk ducts and had not spread to the breast tissue.
“It was the best-case scenario you could imagine for detecting breast cancer,” Dr Mindy Nagle, her physician and friend told People.
Navratilova underwent a lumpectomy and will begin six weeks of radiation therapy in May.
Dr Shelley Hwang, a breast surgeon at University of California San Francisco, says DCIS strikes almost 70,000 American women annually and accounts for about one-fifth of all new diagnosed breast cancers.
“The prognosis of someone with DCIS is excellent, there’s only a one per cent chance that anyone with this diagnosis would die of breast cancer.”
Navratilova is one of the all-time greats of tennis, having defected to the United States from her then-Communist homeland in 1975.
She went on to win 167 singles titles including 18 Grand Slams, 31 Grand Slam women’s doubles, and 10 Grand Slam mixed doubles.
A staunch animal rights advocate, she lives in the US although she appeared in the UK version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here in 2008, coming second.
