And then one day, I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even brush my hair or brush my teeth. Eventually, after going through five, six, seven doctors, I learned that I had a chronic inflammatory disease—rheumatoid arthritis.
My joints had swollen up so painfully because my immune system was in overdrive attacking my body. And though I stayed on tour and gutted it out, all I wanted to do was sleep. (At one point, after a match, I slept for 43 out of 48 hours.)
My rheumatologist and I came up with a plan: I’d take extraordinary care to walk, run, swim—anything, really—just to keep my joints moving; I’d hydrate myself relentlessly and eat a very particular kind of anti-inflammatory diet. It was complicated and precise, but effective—until I reached a point where the entire process became too exhausting: keeping tabs on every single detail of what I ate, how much water I’d been drinking; putting in all the hours, every single day, on the court and in the gym and monitoring my recovery and traveling. That’s when I knew I needed a break.
I announced my retirement just before I played the Australian Open in 2020. In the third round there, I lost in three sets to Ons Jabeur, and everyone in the stadium sang “Sweet Caroline.” It was emotional. It was bittersweet. But at the same time, I knew it was the right thing for me.
David and I spent some time traveling around Australia, and then New Zealand; we climbed Kilimanjaro with my parents, and then David’s mother and my brother joined us and we hiked through the mountains in Poland during a blizzard, using breathing techniques we’d learned to keep us from freezing. It was the most incredible experience of our lives. When COVID hit, David and I spent two months in St. Louis, where David is from, and then we rented a house on this tiny Danish island called Bornholm, south of Sweden and east of the mainland. We quarantined there with our best friends in a farmhouse with a huge piece of land, close to the water, and after that we rented a house north of Copenhagen.
Soon afterward, I realized I was pregnant with Olivia, and then, last October, our son James was born. (My RA, mercifully, went into remission during both pregnancies.) I felt so happy—David felt it too. Our family was in the best place ever.
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