Chris Evert has emerged victorious — and this time, it was off the tennis courtroom.
The tennis legend has revealed she is “cancer-free” in an op-ed revealed on ESPN.com Tuesday.
The 18-time Grand Slam winner was identified with ovarian most cancers in Nov. 2021 — a prognosis that echoed the dying of her sister Jeanne, who died in Feb. 2020 at age 62.
But because of the “genetic road map my sister left behind,” Evert says docs had been capable of detect the illness early — that means that there’s now a 90% likelihood the most cancers “will never come back.”
“Jeanne wasn’t BRCA positive, but genetic testing revealed she had a BRCA-1 variant that was of ‘uncertain significance,’” Evert wrote.
“I got a call saying they had reclassified her BRCA variant — the significance was no longer uncertain, it was now very clearly pathogenic, and we should be tested. I was shocked, I didn’t even know that was possible.”
Evert revealed she was identified with the identical BRCA-1 variant of the illness that killed her sister.
“It is only because of the genetic road map my sister left behind and the power of scientific progress that we caught my cancer early enough to do something about it,” she wrote, saying the state of affairs would have been much more critical if docs didn’t discover the most cancers sooner.
“Instead, I was diagnosed with Stage 1 ovarian cancer, and I immediately began six rounds of chemotherapy,” she added.
Evert says she “held my breath” whereas ready for the pathology outcomes.
“Luckily, the report came back clean and clear, and my risk of developing breast cancer has been reduced by more than 90%,” she wrote, including that she has yet another surgical procedure left to finish.
“As relieved as I will be to get to the other side of this, I will always have a heavy heart. I will never heal from losing Jeanne, and I will never take for granted the gift she gave me in the process,” she went on. “My sister’s journey saved my life, and I hope by sharing mine, I just might save somebody else’s.”
During her glittering profession on the courtroom, Evert reached No. 1 within the WTA rankings and was inducted into the International Hall of Fame in 1995.
This story first appeared within the New York Post and was republished with permission.
