Tennis star reveals cancer to boost testing

MARTINA Navratilova, one of the finest female tennis players of all time, has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

She said she had intended to keep the news to herself but changed her mind when she realised she could persuade other women to go for check-ups.

“I cried,” Navratilova, 53, said about the moment in February when a biopsy came back positive after a routine mammogram revealed a cluster in her left breast.

“I was shocked because I was so sure that the calcifications were benign. I found out and I was devastated. Physically I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, I was useless. I have been healthy all my life and all of a sudden I have cancer. Are you kidding me?”

She will begin six weeks of radiation therapy in May following minor invasive surgery called a lumpectomy and the prognosis for survival was extremely good, experts said.

She was diagnosed with a non-invasive form of breast cancer, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which in her case had not spread to the breast tissue.

“It was the best-case scenario you could imagine for detecting breast cancer,” Mindy Nagle, a good friend of Navratilova, told People magazine.

Shelley Hwang, a breast surgeon at UC San Francisco, said DCIS strikes almost 70,000 American women annually and accounts for about a fifth of all new diagnosed breast cancers.

“There’s only a 1% chance anyone with this diagnosis would die of breast cancer.”

The nine-times Wimbledon champion said she was lucky, as she had not been getting regular check-ups.

“Everyone gets busy, but don’t make excuses. I stay in shape and eat right, and it happened to me. The sooner you catch it, the better,” she said.

“So get the bloody mammogram.”