Singing replaced swinging; karaoke became her way to cope.  “When the music came on, everybody knew,” Williams said. “Like: ‘Didn’t she just go to practice? She’s back already? Must be time to sing.’ ”  Williams said this Monday, in a quiet moment at the French Open, inside a windowless room beneath the courts. Since doctors told her she had Sjögren’s syndrome, an incurable autoimmune disease, last year at the United States Open, everything has changed. Williams says she wakes up each morning unsure of how she will feel.  Rolling the dice, she called it.  Sometimes, her joints hurt and creak. Sometimes, it takes great effort just to move. Some days she feels the way she used to feel, when she conquered women’s tennis and carved a Hall of Fame career. Other days, she feels scared and anxious and does not want to leave the house.  Williams, who is 31, cannot describe exactly what her disease feels like, only the myriad ways it has changed her life. This is the most accurate description she has arrived at: “I always tell people it’s like going to the races. The other cars are ready. The drivers are prepared.” Only Williams is not ready, not prepared the way she wants to be. “So you have to be more confident than everyone else.”  She paused, sighed and collected herself.  “I’m not in control,” she said. “I’m getting used to that. That’s how my life is now. But I’m here. It could be a lot worse.”  Williams said her mind-set changed in February. Not because she felt better. Because she felt she had no choice.  Ever since Williams can remember, her father, Richard, pushed his tennis-playing daughters to become Olympians, even before tennis returned to the Olympics. He loved everything about the Games and watched religiously. His dream became their dream.  “That’s all I want now, to be an Olympian again,” said Venus Williams, who won two gold medals in 2000. “If not for the Olympics, I would probably have come back around now. I would have waited until I was comfortable. Because I was a wreck. My first match back, I couldn’t move my arms. I was like, ‘Can I even win a set?’ ”  Ninety minutes into Williams’s first-round match Sunday, the television above the court had been packed away, the crowd had thinned, even the sun hid behind the clouds. Between points, she walked slowly and gasped for breath.  To most, it was the routine end to a mostly routine first day of the French Open. But to Williams, her 4-6, 6-1, 6-3 victory against Paula Ormaechea of Argentina meant much, much more. She called it a “huge accomplishment” to walk onto the court.  It meant a chance to entrench her solid but uncertain Olympic standing for the London Games. It meant she had successfully returned to Grand Slam play for the first time since the diagnosis.  It meant Williams could play tennis for another day, period. And that meant something, too, far more than when the Williams sisters ruled women’s tennis and it seemed as if they would carry on that way forever. Before the one who started it all got sick.  “My biggest challenge?” Williams mused after the match. “Learning how to live like this.”  Her 15th foray at the French Open proved different from the rest. Never had the expectations been this low when the stakes were this high. Williams’s 54 wins at Roland Garros are the most among active women’s players. Yet matched against an opponent playing in her first French Open main draw, Williams was thought by many to be ripe for an upset.  Williams’s family and friends, perhaps a dozen in all, gathered in her box behind the baseline. They knew as well as anybody that her career had reached its twilight. They watched her after the diagnosis, saw the way she switched to a vegan diet, the strength the disease sapped, the seven-month layoff that resulted.  Ninety minutes in on Sunday, Williams and Ormaechea had played to a standstill, one set apiece, 3-3 in the third. As a cameraman trained his lens on the Williamses’ box, the family matriarch, Oracene Price, implored her daughter forward. “Let’s fight, V!” she said, fist clenched. “Get ready! Get ready!”  Williams would later say, “My mom is, um, interesting.”  To qualify for the Olympics, Williams came back in March. She needed not only to boost her ranking into the top 56 by the end of this French Open but also be ranked no lower than fourth among American women.  She entered her match here ranked 53rd, third among American women. But Vania King and Varvara Lepchenko remained within striking distance, all three separated by no more than 10 slots. (They won their first matches here as American women have compiled a 10-0 record in the first round so far.) The results here will matter. And not only is Williams still dealing with her illness, but she also has to solidify her spot on clay, far and away her worst surface.  Williams listened to her mother, broke Ormaechea easily for 4-3 and held for 5-3. The box practically exploded. Her mother did a little dance. A forehand winner left Williams two points from victory. An error from her opponent secured it.  To say that Williams survived a first-round scare would miss the larger point. She came back in March still ill, still fatigued, ranked 134th. She reached the quarterfinals in Miami, Charleston and Rome. She beat four players ranked in the top 20.  Her sister Serena said: “Everything she’s doing is so inspiring for me.”  On Wednesday, though, Agnieszka Radwanska, the third seed, awaits Williams in the second round. Williams, with no points to defend here after she skipped the French last season, has positioned herself for the Olympic berth that forced her away from her karaoke machine. (She often still travels with one.)  Here, Williams took another step toward London. For now, that was enough.
Suffering from the autoimmune disease SjÃ¶grenâs syndrome, the former No. 1 player in womenâs tennis has returned to Grand Slam competition, and she has set her sights on the Olympics.