Serena Williams has announced her plans to retire from tennis in a recent Vogue essay, where she reflected on the importance of her family, balancing her husband and daughter with her career, and her athletic achievements after becoming a motherhood and facing health challenges.
To be clear, Williams, 40, said that she plans to retire to grow her family, not because of her health or the toll that giving birth to Olympia took on her in 2017.
“I have never liked the wordretirement,” Williams wrote. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to isevolution.”
“These days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter,” she added.
While the sports star expressed some regret at not surpassing Margaret Court's record of 24 Grand Slam titles, only missing by one, she reminded readers of what she accomplished by playing in recent years, even if she didn't clinch any Grand Slam wins.
"I went from a C-section to a second pulmonary embolism to a grand slam final," she wrote. "I played while breastfeeding. I played through postpartum depression.But I didn’t get there. Shoulda, woulda, coulda."
"I didn’t show up the way I should have or could have. But I showed up 23 times, and that’s fine. Actually it’s extraordinary."
Williams' commitment to tennis after welcoming Olympia is even more impressive given went she through in childbirth, including the secondary pulmonary embolism, a life-threatening blood clot in the lungs, that she mentioned. In an essay for Elle magazine earlier this year, she detailed what that experience was like and how she had to fight not to become another tragic statistic in the delivery room.
For 11 years, Williams had known of her high-risk tendency to blood clots. In 2011, thetennis ace suffered from her first pulmonary embolism. It almostput her on her death bed and forced her to be vigilant about making sure her health history doesn’t repeat itself. She wrote in Elle that she had to rally for herself when the symptoms of a clot began to crop up during childbirth — even after the continuous dismissal of a healthcare provider.
"No one was really listening to what I was saying," she wrote.
Williams detailed how she realized something was wrong soon after giving birth to Olympia. Her legs were "numb," she said, and eventually she found herself in "excruciating pain" and realized she couldn't move her legs and back.
“I may have passed out a few times,” she recalled, noting that she quickly raised her concern to her delivery team that she was likely in need ofheparin, a drug that helps prevent blood clots. “The response was, ‘Well, we don’t really know if that’s what you need to be on right now.’"
She explained that the logic was that blood thinners could cause her C-section wound to bleed, but Williams "felt it was important and kept pressing.”
She began to breathe heavily and cough — both symptoms of blood clotting. She coughed so hard that her stitches burst and she had to go back into surgery — a procedure that would become the first in a merry-go-round of surgeries.
“When I woke up from that surgery, in the hospital room with my parents and my in-laws, I felt like I was dying. They were trying to talk to me, and all I could think was, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying. Oh my God,’” she explained. Despite fearing that she would faint, Williams managed to get up from her hospital bed and out of her mother’s earshot to avoid worrying her to find her nurse that was on call.
