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The Telegraph
Carla Suarez Navarro: ‘Chemotherapy was hard, but playing at Wimbledon one last time inspires me’
Carla Suarez Navarro trusts that Friday will herald the end of an eight-month horror. It was on August 28 last year that this ebullient Spaniard, seven times a Grand Slam quarter-finalist but stricken by a strange nausea that she mistook initially as Covid-19, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of 31. After eight bouts of chemotherapy, and painful struggles with hair loss assuaged by her love of chess and of painting mandalas – a geometric artform often used as therapy – she heads back into a Barcelona hospital on Friday morning for what her doctors are confident will be her final radiotherapy session. But she is adamant that her path to recovery does not end here. Confounding even the most optimistic medical prognoses, Suarez Navarro discloses that she hopes not only to compete at her 12th and final Wimbledon this summer, but to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. It represents quite the rebound for an athlete who, amid the harshness of Spanish lockdowns, has been fighting her own battle with cancer. The emotional toll, clearly, weighs heavily. In tennis, her feelings have seldom been difficult to read: at last year’s Australian Open, soon after confirming her intention to retire, the former world No 6 burst into tears on court and had to be consoled by her interviewer. But through her subsequent ordeal, she has drawn on reserves of resilience she barely knew she possessed. “The symptoms started last July, while I was still playing,” she explains. She had been gagging, listless, a condition that seemed to grow worse whenever she was in extreme heat. “The doctors tried so many tests: PCRs for coronavirus, stomach biopsies, positron emission topography, bone marrow examinations, until they came to a lymphoma diagnosis.” Beyond the shock, her reaction was oddly placid. She resolved not to scour the internet for worse-case scenarios but to concentrate solely on how she could recover. “I sincerely believe that being a professional tennis player helped me hugely during treatment, to improve myself, to make an effort, to continue in the fight and not give up,” she explains. “It allowed me to be patient, convinced that everything would pass and that finally the result would be worth it. Finding the good side to tough situations is something I have learned.”