They made her violently ill and she weighed 80lb when she passed. I’d seen her with ports in her chest and needles in her arms and, after chemo, going through experimental drugs.
“I thought a lot about Jeanne and it was scarier knowing what the journey ahead would be for me if I was stage four, more than the actual dying. Those memories shrouded her four-day wait. I was also shocked, like I was in a fog, and I was so scared I used my powers on the court and tried to block it out a little.”Įvert was close to her sister and witnessed her years of suffering. “I prayed a lot, and I prayed to my sister. “I felt so anxious because I had no control over the situation,” she says. She was revered for her composure on court, even when she first became famous after reaching the semi-finals of the US Open in 1971 at the age of 16 but Evert looks up with a tangled expression when I ask her to describe her emotions while waiting for those test results. The 67-year-old has been such a familiar presence for so long, firstly as a remarkable tennis player and then in the commentary box, that it feels jolting to hear her confront her own death. But Evert’s blunt reaction is understandable. Medical research suggests that patients who have stage four ovarian cancer have a 15% chance of surviving for more than five years while the prognosis improves to over 25% for those in stage three. When you find out you have ovarian cancer you’re usually stage three or four, which means curtains, basically.” My kind of cancer, ovarian cancer, is very insidious and sneaky as there aren’t many signs that you have it. If I tested positive for the lymph nodes I would have been stage three or four. She had then been tested to ascertain whether the cancer had spread, as she says “all the way to the lymph nodes connected to my reproductive organs. Evert, who won 18 grand slam titles from 1974 to 1986, had just come through surgery for ovarian cancer. “It was the longest four days of my life,” Chris Evert says as she remembers facing her mortality last December while waiting for a second cancer diagnosis.
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