AP Picture/Kirsty Wigglesworth
Tennis legend Chris Evert announced in an article for ESPN that she is cancer-free after being identified with Stage I ovarian most cancers in Nov. 2021.
Evert mentioned she underwent a preventative hysterectomy and 6 rounds of chemotherapy and there is a 90 p.c likelihood that her most cancers won’t return.
She additionally mentioned that she had a double mastectomy in December 2022 so as to cut back her threat of getting breast most cancers as a result of she examined optimistic for a similar BRCA-1 gene variant that her sister Jeanne Evert Dubin had. Jeanne died from BRCA-related ovarian most cancers in Feb. 2020.
That variant was initially dubbed by medical professionals to be of “unsure significance,” however was later reclassified as being pathogenic after Jeanne’s loss of life. Evert mentioned she and her siblings underwent genetic testing after studying of the reclassification, which revealed that she possessed the identical BRCA-1 variant as her sister.
She underwent the hysterectomy in December 2021 and a pathology report subsequently uncovered “malignant cells and a tumor in [her] left fallopian tube.”
“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. “My physician mentioned if left undiscovered, in 4 months’ time I’d in all probability have been Stage 3 like Jeanne, with only a few choices.”
Evert mentioned she nonetheless has yet another reconstructive surgical procedure forward of her, and that she is sharing her story to persuade others to contemplate genetic testing if they’ve a household historical past of most cancers.
“As relieved as I will probably be to get to the opposite aspect of this, I’ll at all times have a heavy coronary heart,” she wrote. “I’ll by no means heal from shedding Jeanne, and I’ll by no means take with no consideration the present she gave me within the course of. My sister’s journey saved my life, and I hope by sharing mine, I simply would possibly save any individual else’s.”
Evert, 68, is among the most profitable tennis gamers of all time, with 18 Grand Slam titles in her profession and 260 weeks atop the ladies’s tennis rankings. Her rivalry with Martina Navratilova within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties is the stuff of tennis lore, with Navratilova successful 18 Grand Slam titles herself.
