Danielle Collins ends year of pain with quarter-final place in Australian Open

Just under a year ago, right in the heat of another Australian summer, Danielle Collins was reduced to a level of pain that she would not wish on another soul. By the third set of her match against Daria Kasatkina in the Philip Island Trophy, an event held at Melbourne Park during the second week of the Australian Open, she fell to the ground while severely cramping in her abdominal muscles and pelvis.

Through her pained tears, Collins had to resort to hitting underarm serves and throwing up desperate moonballs but she fell 6-1 in the final set. A week later, she withdrew from a tournament in Adelaide with severe back pain that flared up around her cycle but would not show up on MRI scans.

One year on, Collins has returned to the scene of those brutal moments and on Monday she continued one of the most impressive and heartening stories in the sport by reaching the quarter-final of the Australian Open, defeating Elise Mertens 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 in nearly three hours.

During those days when Collins was in constant pain, she did not know what was causing it. Her consultations with doctors all yielded the same unconvincing responses - that her period pains were normal and that anti-inflammatory medicine would help. Eventually, they did not. Her health became progressively worse and in April 2021, Collins underwent emergency surgery to treat endometriosis.

Endometriosis is an extremely painful condition in which tissue similar to the tissue that lines the uterus grows outside of it, and affects an estimated one in ten women. For Collins, it marked the second major health diagnosis of her short professional career as she also was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2018, an autoimmune disease that causes painful swelling in the