Erin Andrews says cervical cancer helped relationship with Jarret Stroll
ABC’s Erin Andrews opened up about her cervical cancer and hot it helped her relationship with Jarrett Stroll grow.
It's been almost two-and-a-half years since Erin Andrews was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Now, the sportscaster is cancer-free and looking back at her journey.
"I get really emotional about it," Andrews told Entertainment Tonight in a new interview published on Friday. "My family has been through so much with everything that I've been through in my life, and it's just like, they need a break. My husband, that was a lot to deal with, and I don't really like dealing with the things like this in my life. I want to talk about next year's Super Bowl and 'Dancing With the Stars' and the fall season, and everything like that.
"It's a lot but, to be honest with you, it could've been a lot worse and it could've gone a different way," she continued. "So thankfully it didn't and thankfully I went and got tested."
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The 40-year-old "Dancing with the Stars" host was diagnosed in September 2016. Five months later, she shared the news with her fans.
'"Uh, what?' That was what went through my mind," she recalled to ET. "It was football season and when you hear from your doctor on a Saturday it's not good. It's like, 'Oh boy what's this text coming in?' I think a whole numbness went all over my body. I couldn't feel my arms for a hot second, I ran out of the conference room I was in, took the call, got my family on it, and I was just like, 'What are you saying?' I do remember saying that to my gyno at the time, saying, 'What am I supposed to tell my family?'"
Andrews' reaction naturally turned into "shock, fear, crying."
"'Does this mean I'm not going to work this year?'" she remembered thinking. "We had the Super Bowl that year, I want to do the Super Bowl, I have 'Dancing With the Stars.' But then it went into problem-solving. How do we fix this? How do we take care of this and fast?"
Despite having two surgeries, Andrews was determined to not slow down, getting right back to work with the support of her husband, Jarrett Stroll.
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"The coolest part about it is, my husband is an athlete and I love the fact that he's so competitive, and he thinks of it as an athlete," Andrews explained. "As I remember, I'm on the couch and my first surgery didn't go well. I was just bawling my brains out and I had to get on a red-eye flight that night to Green Bay because I wasn't going to miss my sit-down interview with Jordy Nelson, and I wasn't going to miss Dallas at Green Bay. I was screaming, crying, and I remember my husband being like, 'It's OK babe, we got this. We're going to beat this. We got this.'"
From there, the 36-year-old former hockey pro "went into competitive mode," a trait about her husband Andrews loves "so much."
"I think if anything it got us stronger. He went to a lot of doctors' meetings, saw a lot of diagrams and sat there. And this is a guy who cares about winning face-offs and winning penalty kills and so forth, and he was like, 'We got this, we got this.' It made conversations about having babies very real and candid for him and our life and everything. So he was amazing."
Although she "feels great" to be cancer-free, Andrews admits she's still worried about the future.
"The thought of going for my six-month checkup is very frightening," said the TV personality, who encourages all women to visit their doctor to get Pap and HPV tests done to screen for cervical cancer.
"But what feels better about the whole thing is [that] now I've decided to be public about the whole thing and decided to share my story. I'm a voice for a disease, for a cancer, that wasn't being talked about at all."
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