REAL Madrid's former goalkeeper Iker Casillas has just celebrated his 38th birthday a month after collapsing with a heart attack whilst training with his current team, Oporto – and just days after his wife, Sara Carbonero, discovered she had ovarian cancer.
Reporter and TV presenter Sara, who rushed from Tarifa (Cádiz province) to Portugal to be with her footballer husband as he underwent a stent operation, says she has been under knife herself this week and is facing possibly gruelling treatment.
She had gone to her gynaecologist for a routine check-up, during which the clinic found a malignant tumour on her ovary.
Fortunately, the chance discovery was at an early stage, meaning the operation to remove the tumour is said to have been a success, but Sara is not yet out of the woods.
“I've still got months of battle to come whilst I undergo the corresponding treatment,” Sara (pictured with Iker in hospital) said on Instagram, although she has not confirmed whether this will involve radiotherapy, chemotherapy, both, or a combination of prescribed drugs to take at home.
“I'm feeling calm and confident that it will all go well.
“I know this will be a tough journey, but that it will also have a happy ending. I have the support of my family and friends and a great medical team.”
She asked her 'reporter colleagues' to show her the 'respect and understanding' that they have 'always treated her with' – and 'especially during such a difficult and delicate time for me and my family'.
Sara opened her Instagram post by saying that this blow had come 'just as we had recovered from one scare', meaning Iker's myocardial infarction which struck out of the blue – luckily, during a training session when he had his colleagues and manager around him to call for medical help – and revealed that she was struggling to come to terms with the news.
“This time it's happened to me, that scary six-letter word that I still find hard to write,” Sara said.
Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest strains of the disease, since it is relatively symptom-free until it is at a very late stage, meaning it is not often discovered in time to treat.
Thankfully, Sara's was found during a routine examination, at an early enough stage that she would have been unlikely to have noticed anything amiss, meaning surgery and treatment are expected to be successful.
