Nine-time Grand Slam tennis champion Monica Seles has revealed she is “learning to live with a new normal” after being diagnosed with a rare chronic neuromuscular disease three years ago.
Seles was told she has myasthenia gravis (MG), a condition which causes muscle weakness, in 2022.
The 51-year-old has told the Associated Press she first noticed the symptoms of the disease while she was playing tennis.
The Serbian-American tennis great said: “I would be playing with some kids or family members, and I would miss a ball. I was like, ‘Yeah, I see two balls’.
“These are obviously symptoms that you can’t ignore.
“And, for me, this is when this journey started. And it took me quite some time to really absorb it, speak openly about it, because it’s a difficult one. It affects my day-to-day life quite a lot.”
Seles, who won her first major trophy at age 16 at the 1990 French Open and played her last match in 2003, also experienced weakness in her arms and legs and said “just blowing my hair out… became very difficult”.
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She said she had decided to speak publicly about her condition for the first time ahead of the US Open, which starts on 24 August, to raise awareness.
America’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke calls it “a chronic neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the voluntary muscles” and “most commonly impacts young adult women (under 40) and older men (over 60)” but … can occur at any age, including childhood”.
It is an autoimmune disease – used to describe a condition where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy cells, tissues, and organs.
The US National Institutes of Health has said it affects around 1 in 5,000 people.
Seles, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2009, said she’d never heard of the condition until she saw a doctor about her symptoms and was referred to a neurologist.
“When I got diagnosed, I was like, ‘What?!’,” said Seles, who is partnering with argenx, an immunology company headquartered in the Netherlands, to promote their Go for Greater campaign which aims to help people with MG.
“So this is where – I can’t emphasise enough – I wish I had somebody like me speak up about it.”
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It’s been three decades since Seles returned to competition at the 1995 US Open, making it to the final, more than two years after she was attacked by a man with a knife at a tournament in Hamburg, Germany.
“The way they welcomed me… after my stabbing, I will never forget,” Seles said about the fans in New York. “Those are the moments that stay with you.”
Seles said she is learning to live a “new normal” nowadays and characterised her health as another in a series of life steps that required her to adapt.
She said: “I had to, in tennis terms, I guess, reset – hard reset – a few times. I call my first hard reset when I came to the US as a young 13-year-old (from Yugoslavia). Didn’t speak the language; left my family. It’s a very tough time. Then, obviously, becoming a great player, it’s a reset, too, because the fame, money, the attention, changes (everything), and it’s hard as a 16-year-old to deal with all that. Then obviously my stabbing – I had to do a huge reset.”
Seles continued: “And then, really, being diagnosed with myasthenia gravis: another reset. But one thing, as I tell kids that I mentor: ‘You’ve got to always adjust. That ball is bouncing, and you’ve just got to adjust’. And that’s what I’m doing now.”
