Tennis great Martina Navratilova said she’s cancer-free, just over two months after revealing she had been diagnosed with two unrelated forms of cancer.
The former top-ranked tennis star described her frightening experience in an upcoming interview with Piers Morgan on U.K.’s Talk TV.
“I’m like, ‘Oh great, I have another cancer.’ That’s when I started crying on the table,” the former pro athlete told the broadcaster in the episode of “Piers Morgan: Uncensored” scheduled to air Tuesday night.
“I was in a total panic for three days thinking I may not see next Christmas,” she added.
That’s when, Navratilova said, she started forming a bucket list of all the things she wanted to do with the remainder of her life.
“This may sound really shallow, but I was like, ‘OK, which kick-ass car do I really want to drive if I live like a year?’ ” she joked.
The diagnosis also led Navratilova and her wife, 50-year-old Julia Lemigova, to postpone plans to adopt a child.
Lemigova, one of the stars of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Miami,” reacted to the news in a statement to the network, saying she was very “proud of [her] champion for taking on two cancers and beating them triumphantly.”
The Prague-born Navratilova, one of the most successful tennis players of all time, said earlier this year she had been diagnosed with Stage 1 throat cancer and early-stage breast cancer.
The 66-year-old had already battled breast cancer in 2010. She said she was hopeful for a favorable outcome, referring to her health scare as “serious but still fixable.”
“It’s going to stink for a while, but I’ll fight with all [I’ve] got,” she said at the time.
And fight she did. After undergoing chemo and radiation treatment at the same time — which she called “the hardest thing [she’s] ever done” — Navratilova told Morgan that as far as her doctors know, she’s “cancer-free.”
