Erin Andrews opens up to Health Magazine about her fight with cervical cancer
When Erin Andrews made the decision to freeze her embryos a few years back, it was “just because it was all the rage.” But the choice proved to be fortuitous when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in Sept. 2016.
“It definitely took a serious turn for us,” Andrews, 39, tells Health for its July/August cover story of her chances of conceiving with fiancé Jarret Stoll. “I’m not young, we don’t know when we’re going to have a baby, we don’t know if this is going to come back.”
Andrews, a sideline reporter for NFL on Fox, learned of her cervical cancer shortly after settling her $55 million lawsuit against the Nashville Marriott, where a stranger secretly filmed her nude through her door.
Between that and the start of the new football season, Andrews kept her diagnosis a secret from the public — and her coworkers.
“Working with a bunch of men, I didn’t wanna be like, ‘Sooo, they think I have cervical cancer,’ and they’d be like, ‘Where’s your cervix?’ ” she says. “But I’d also come off this huge trial that was kind of the focus of the summer, and I don’t want to be the girl that always has the problems at the table — ‘And now I have cancer!’ ”
She says there was an even more personal reason she decided to keep her health issues private.
“I also think that I didn’t want to believe it was that big a deal, so we kept it quiet. But the wait was horrible.”
She quietly underwent surgery on Oct. 11, and two days later she was on a plane to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the Packers game that weekend — against her doctor’s advice.
Andrews got the happy news that the surgery was successful the next week.
“At Dancing with the Stars that Monday, I was in my dressing room when the phone rang and [the doctor] said, ‘You’re good. We got it.’ I was like, ’Oh my God,’ crying — while trying on a ballroom dress,” she says.
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She eventually opened up about her diagnosis and successful treatment to Sports Illustrated’s The MMQB in January.Now, Andrews is looking forward to her life with Stoll — and hopes to have kids, while continuing to work.
“I want to continue doing more, but it’s going to be shaped toward how I want to have this family and how I do want to have kids” she says. “I think it’s possible that I’ll be able to have a kid and be able to do this for a living. We’re just gonna have to figure out how.”
