We're used to seeing Erin Andrews covering contentious NFL games and co-hosting Dancing with the Stars, but a recent interview with Health magazine revealed a different side to the beloved reporter and TV personality.
During the interview, Andrews opened up about her cervical cancer diagnosis and its impact on her personal life and relationship with now-fiancé, hockey player Jarret Stoll. Though Andrews knew the diagnosis wouldn't be easy to cope with, she said one of the things she was most surprised by was how much it made her think about family planning and how incredible and supportive Stoll, who was her boyfriend at the time, was throughout the process.
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"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,'" she told Health. "We hadn't even been discussing marriage. 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.'"
As Today points out, Andrews wasted no time in having the scary, yet necessary, conversation with Stoll.
"I'm like, 'Hi, hon. I love you. I hope we're spending our lives together,'" Andrews said. "And he was amazing."
Today reports that Andrews is now cancer-free, but that the scare was enough to launch her IVF plans anyway.
"I'm not young, we don't know when we're gonna have a baby, we don't know if this is going to come back," Andrews, who is 39, told Health. "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. If we need 'em, we need 'em; and if we don't, we don't. We just want to be smart."
Andrews is lucky to have had such a supportive partner during the IVF process. For many women, the extraordinary financial and physical burdens from the procedure can be life-consuming and too difficult to handle on their own.
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Though Andrews and Stoll haven't announced a plan to have a child in the future, they've started honing their parenting skills with a darling fur baby.
And they're taking it seriously, too!