The scare came during Taylor Townsend’s run at the Guadalajara Open in September, days after she won the US Open women’s doubles title with Katerina Siniakova, completing her career Grand Slam. Waking up at around 2:30 a.m. with severe abdominal pain ahead of her scheduled round-of-16 match against top seed Marta Kostyuk, Townsend initially thought she had food poisoning and asked her physio to come to her hotel room, still hoping to be able to play that afternoon.

The physio examined Townsend and became concerned that the problem could involve her appendix, prompting a doctor to assess her before she was sent to the hospital for further testing. An ultrasound confirmed her appendix was inflamed, and doctors moved quickly, as she ultimately underwent an emergency appendectomy.

Two weeks after that surgery, Townsend is now working on rebuilding her fitness, sharing glimpses of her rehabilitation on social media. In recent Instagram stories, she went for a 20-minute run, saying it feels “good,” alongside focused sessions on abdominal wall rehabilitation. 

One update showed Townsend performing bracing and core-activation exercises with her recovery team, while another showed her balancing on a Bosu ball and performing squats as she works to rebuild her fitness.

Untreated appendicitis can lead to a ruptured appendix and serious complications, which is why Townsend needed urgent medical attention. After being diagnosed with appendicitis in Guadalajara, she returned to Texas, where she underwent the emergency appendectomy in Houston. From a hospital bed, Townsend posted a selfie and wrote that it “definitely wasn’t on my bingo card”. She closed with “still I rise,” the title of a Maya Angelou poem.

In a hospital video, she said she had gone more than 36 hours without food and joked that she was about to vanish: “I’m coming up well over 36 hours no food, I was finally able to drink something but I’m just about to like disappear into this bed.” 

She also posted a photo of her son, Adyn, flexing his arms, with the caption “Baby boy told me to flex up and be strong, so that I shall”.

Her son, who is just five, has already become one of Townsend’s most adorable sources of perspective. After she lost a grueling three-hour US Open match in 2025, he simply told her, “Good job, Mom.” When she reminded him that she had lost, his response was that it was okay. Townsend later said she wanted to carry that attitude with her.

That said, this wasn’t Townsend’s first frightening detour from the court. After suffering a concussion at the Miami Open in 2025, she initially tried to carry on before realizing that something was badly wrong. The symptoms became impossible to ignore: dizziness, blurry vision, headaches, and light sensitivity. She later described the experience as a wake-up call, and the hardest part was the uncertainty: she could feel fine sitting still, only to feel terrible the moment she tried to do something.

In fact, Townsend has been forced to confront uncomfortable interruptions since she was a teenager. At 16, despite winning the Australian Open junior singles and doubles titles and Wimbledon junior doubles title, she was sent to Florida for an eight-week fitness block that kept her out of the US Open. She later recalled hearing “eight weeks” and feeling her stomach drop.

As a mother, too, this isn’t the first time Townsend has had to rewrite a recovery plan. After giving birth to Adyn, she had expected one kind of return to tennis, only for an unplanned C-section to change the equation. Her comeback had to be rebuilt around the surgery, something she later summed up as a journey of “blood, sweat, tears… and milk.”

For now, Townsend has not given a firm return date, but she said she is “shooting for year-end championships” as she works her way back to competition.