'My personal 9/11': Tennis legend Martina Navratilova reveals her heartache at being diagnosed with breast cancer

 

Fears: Martina Navratilova says she cried when she was diagnosed with breast cancer

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has revealed that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

The 53-year-old admitted she was 'devastated' by the news as she announced she is battling the disease on a U.S. TV show.

The former champion said she was diagnosed with the DCIS form of cancer in February and described the bad news as 'my personal 9/11'.

Navratilova said on ABC's Good Morning America that she had not had a mammogram in four years before she got a check-up.

Navratilova appeared on GMA to urge other women to get a yearly check-up for breast cancer.

The star said she has already had lumpectomy surgery and will receive six-weeks of radiation treatment, which gives the disease just a ten per cent chance of recurring.

Navratilova says she hopes to continue working as a tennis analyst through her treatment.

'It is kind of good news and bad news. I have breast cancer but it is DCIS, which is a non-invasive form of breast cancer and I have a very great chance at recovery and just a small chance of it coming back.

'So that is the deal,' she said on GMA.

Pain: Navratilova admitted she was devastated by the news as she announced she is battling the disease on Good Morning America

'I found out February 24, it was my personal 9/11. I was shocked as I was sure that the calcifications were benign.

'I was devastated. Physically I could not think or move, I was useless. 

'That is where it helps to have a good support group and my best friend is my OB-GYN.

At first I thought I would keep it private and that there was no need to talk about it.

'But the more I found out about what it was, I thought "This is ridiculous."

'I am a healthy person, I am a health and fitness ambassador, I have been healthy all my life and all of a sudden I have cancer. Are you kidding me?

'But I took four years before I had my last mammogram, I let it slide.  "I moved, I changed doctors and I thought I would get to it.

Champion: The tennis legend won a record nine Wimbledon women's single finals during her three-decade-long career

'I didn't realise that it had been four years. I want to encourage women to have that yearly check-up.

'I am lucky that this DCIS had started in the last year, if it had started in the last three years I would have been in deep trouble.

'I would have needed chemotherapy, the cancer would have spread. It is just in that one breast and I will be okay.

'I had a biopsy, which is how we found that it was positive, and a lumpectomy three weeks ago.

'I played some hockey games in between and two weeks after it I did the biking portion of a triathlon.

'I needed to keep going. But when I got the news from the doctors I still went to hockey practice that night and I could barely skate.

'The emotions took so much physical strength out of me, I didn't realise how much impact physically this has on you.

'Both my sister and my mother had those calcifications but they were benign. I drew the short straw I guess.'

She spoke to U.S. website People about the moment in February when a biopsy came back positive after a routine mammogram revealed a cluster in her left breast.

'I cried,' she said. '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 diagnosed with a non-invasive form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which in her case was confined to the milk ducts and had not spread to the breast tissue.

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