Serena Williams opens up on recent cyst scare

Serena Williams is on the road to recovery after a recent surgical operation to remove a benign branchial cyst in her neck.

The 23-time Grand Slam singles champion, who turned 43 last month, opened up on her recent health scare in a series of social media posts this week, writing on TikTok that she first discovered the lump back in May, and underwent an MRI that gave her the diagnosis.  After doctors told her that she didn’t need to remove it if she “didn’t want to,” it “kept growing,” Williams wrote, to the size of a “small grapefruit.”

More testing — including a biopsy — followed, and though it was still benign, Williams ultimately made the decision to get it removed.

Showing a video of herself in a hospital bed, Williams went on to write: “So this is me removing it. I am feeling so grateful, and fortunate everything worked out, and most of all I’m healthy.”

The procedure caused her to miss Glamour‘s Women of the Year awards in New York last week, where she was to be honored as one of the magazine’s Global Women of the Yearas well as the announcement of fellow all-time great Rafael Nadal’s impending retirement from tennis.

“Health always comes first,” she wrote Tuesday in a post on X, formerly Twitter, adding that she is “still recovering.”

Her husband, businessman and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, was chief among the swaths of fans who sent the former World No.1 encouraging messages in the comments of her posts.

“I feel really happy to have worked with some great doctors,” Williams said in her video, writing that “all is OK.”