Television personality Erin Andrews revealed to MMQB that she learned she had cervical cancer in September, requiring a number of surgical procedures throughout the NFL regular season but no radiation or chemotherapy treatments.
Andrews, a sideline reporter for Fox Sports’ NFL coverage, did not miss any on-camera time though she did miss two tapings of “Dancing With the Stars,” which she co-hosts on ABC. In fact, she didn’t even initially tell her Fox Sports colleagues of her diagnosis and was back working two days after her surgery, flying to Green Bay to film a story on Packers wideout Jordy Nelson.
Eventually, she told her colleagues after they noticed she didn’t quite seem like herself. And, after another procedure on Nov. 1, she was declared to be cancer-free with no need for further treatment.
The cancer diagnosis is merely the latest trouble for Andrews, who has had a trying couple of years. In 2008, a man named Michael David Barrett filmed her naked in her hotel rooms in Tennessee and Wisconsin while she was on the road working for ESPN, later posting the videos to the Internet. Barrett was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2010, and Andrews later sued him and the company that manages the hotel in Tennessee where she was stalked. A jury found them liable for Andrews’s emotional distress and awarded her $55 million in damages, though she settled the case for an undisclosed amount in April.
“After the trial everyone kept telling me, ‘You’re so strong, for going through all of this, for holding down a job in football, for being the only woman on the crew,’ ” Andrews said of her decision to keep working during her cancer battle. “Finally I got to the point where I believed it too. ‘Hey, I have cancer, but dammit, I am strong, and I can do this.’ “