Martina Navratilova, a tennis legend, has said that she has been told she has two types of cancer. Here’s what you should know about who won Wimbledon nine times. In this article, you will information regarding her health and the forms of cancer she has.
Who is Martina Navratilova?
Martina Navratilova was born in 1956 in Prague, which was then part of Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic. Martina Navratilova was born Martina Subertova, but when her parents got a divorce when she was three years old, she took the name of her new stepfather, Miroslav Navratil (adding “ova”), who had married her mother in 1962.
Navratil would also teach her how to play tennis for the first time. Navratilova started playing tennis regularly when she was seven years old. She won the Czechoslovakian national championship in 1972 when she was just 15 years old. After she turned pro in 1975, she won a record 167 career titles and 59 Grand Slam titles, including 18 singles titles, 31 doubles titles, and ten mixed doubles titles. Her career lasted until 2006.
Navratilova is also the best female tennis player who has ever played at SW19. She has won a record nine women’s singles championships, and some of her best matches have been at the All England Club. With her serve and volley style, Navratilova was world No. 1 in singles for 332 weeks and in doubles for 237 weeks. She was the only player to ever hold the top spot in both for more than 200 weeks.
She was put into the tennis hall of fame in 2000. Many people thought she was one of the best female players of all time.
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What Kind Of Cancer Does She Have?
Two kinds of cancer have been found in Martina Navratilova. In November, the 66-year-old woman found a swollen lymph node in her neck. It happened 13 years after the Czech-American was treated for breast cancer with radiation therapy and given the all-clear.
She said this about her diagnosis: “This double whammy is serious but still fixable. “I’m hoping for a favorable outcome. It’s going to stink for a while, but I’ll fight with all I have got.”
“I cried,” Navratilova, 53, tells PEOPLE about the moment in February when a routine mammogram showed a cluster in her left breast and a biopsy came back positive. “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.”
She was told she had ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which is a type of breast cancer that does not spread. In her case, the tumor was only in the milk ducts and had not been applied to the breast tissue. “It was the best-case scenario you could imagine for detecting breast cancer,” ” Dr. Mindy Nagle, Navratilova’s good friend, and ob-gyn, tells PEOPLE.
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Navratilova had a lumpectomy and will start radiation treatment for six weeks in May. Dr. Shelley Hwang, a breast surgeon at UC San Francisco, says that DCIS affects about one-fifth of all newly diagnosed breast cancers and affects about 70,000 American women each year.
“The prognosis of someone with DCIS is excellent,” she says. “There’s only a one-percent chance of anyone with this diagnosis would die of breast cancer.” The nine-time Wimbledon champion, who still plays tennis and ice hockey and competes in triathlons, says she is lucky, as she had not been getting regular checkups.
“I went four years between mammograms,” she tells PEOPLE. “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.”
