Erin Andrews is looking at the bright side. The sportscaster revealed that one positive thing came out of her cervical cancer diagnosis and surgery last fall.
The 39-year-old said it brought her closer to her now-fiancé, Jarret Stoll. “It was a huge step for my relationship with my boyfriend at the time,” she told Health magazine’s July/August 2017 issue. “Because you don’t know if a guy is going to want to sit in with an oncologist and see, ‘OK, so this is your cervix, and this is your uterus, and we are cutting out this part…’”
The scary situation helped her and the former NHL star, 34, realize they wanted a future together. “We hadn’t even been discussing marriage,” she said. “We hadn’t discussed babies! It really puts things on the fast track for you — because you have an oncologist saying to you, ‘We highly recommend that you guys do your embryos right now, freeze them.’ I’m like, ‘Hi, hon. I love you. I hope we’re spending our lives together.’ And he was amazing.”
The Dancing With the Stars host said the couple, who got engaged in December after more than four years of dating, took the doctor’s advice and froze embryos — plus, she’s currently undergoing in vitro fertilization. “One thing I love my future husband for is that our oncologist said the smart thing to do would be to have some insurance waiting — so we have frozen embryos because we’ve taken the steps,” she said. “We don’t know what the future entails. We actually had to push this photo shoot because I was in the middle of [the IVF cycle]. I’m doing all these shots and in these bathing suits, and I was like, ‘Yay, look at my pin marks!’”
Andrews said the past year has been a whirlwind. “We went from football to everything that happened to freezing embryos — mixing hormones and wedding planning,” she said.
After spending years focusing on her career, she’s ready to dedicate more time to family. “I grew up in the South. People were getting married at 21; I had my first major job at 21, and I was missing everybody’s weddings because I was doing football games and baseball games,” Andrews continued. “I had never been to Europe until two years ago — I’ve gone to all the sports cities, but I’d never had a life for myself. 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. I think it’s possible that I’ll be able to have a kid and be able to do this for a living.”
And her family is already growing — sort of! She revealed that the couple are getting a dog soon. “It’s our first child, so we’re very excited,” she said. “He’s a golden retriever; we’re naming him Howard.”
