And offers me some hope for my own battle.
When you interview public figures, you’re often beholden to their schedule. As a journalist, I’ve moved mountains to book a conversation with a prominent pop-culture figure. And I get it — these people have movies to make, shows to film, and many, many more interviews to do.
But there are some issues in my life that can’t be altered, one of which is infertility. Luckily, when I recently had to cancel an interview with Fox sportscaster Erin Andrews — because my embryo transfer had been scheduled for the same day — I felt completely comfortable telling her team why it wouldn’t work: Andrews welcomed her first child Mack via surrogate in June 2023 after having tried to get pregnant for 10 years. So she knows all too well how the process can throw everything else in your life into utter chaos. “I’m pretty hardcore about not letting anything affect my job,” Andrews, 45, told me a week later via Zoom. “But there were times [during infertility treatment] when I just felt really down, I felt like sh*t. I had to pack needles [for nightly hormone injections] when going to games, I had to miss meetings because I had to go to get my labs done.” Needless to say, she was generous about rescheduling.
We met a week after my transfer, and the first thing Andrews asked was, “How’d it go?” which was surprising — it’s not often celebrities lead with a question for the interviewer. But this didn’t end up being a standard interview. It was more of a crash course in trauma bonding that ended with us both in tears. I normally wouldn’t let that transpire on the job, but that’s what happens when you put two infertility comrades on a call together.
Andrews started freezing her eggs 10 years ago when she was 35, as a precaution. “I didn’t know when I was going to get married and if I even would have kids, so it felt like a smart thing to do,” she says. “And then my life unfolded in a way I didn’t expect, and that’s when I needed to get serious.” Andrews was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2017 while dating her now-husband, former NHL player Jarret Stoll. “We didn’t know if I was going to need a hysterectomy, so I needed to get some eggs before treatment. I wasn’t engaged,” she says. “We weren’t even talking about marriage yet. But we were facing [family planning, cancer, and our future] all at once.”
Andrews had two surgeries to treat her cancer, and she was deemed cancer-free shortly afterward. But she was still mid-storm, in terms of fertility: She went through nine egg-retrieval cycles over 10 years — before and after her cancer treatment. “I froze my eggs and I thought, Oh, I have enough. This is so great. I didn’t understand it wasn’t as easy as just harvesting a good amount of eggs. You could get 11 eggs but create no embryos [because of factors like poor egg or sperm quality]. And that’s what happened to me a couple of times,” she recalls. “I wasn’t having success, which is why I did it for so long. It was exhausting.”
One thing Andrews believes helped improve her egg quality was switching her supplements. “I would always hear it had something to do with my age, or ‘Maybe it’s just this cycle,’ or ‘Maybe your body’s not responding to the hormones…Let’s try new drugs…How about an estrogen patch?’ Or ‘Your follicles aren’t where we need them to be.’ It was like, OK, what next?” she recalls. But one consistent recommendation she got from every practitioner — from her doctor to her acupuncturist — was to try Thorne supplements.
Most people who’ve been tormented by infertility will tell you they’ve been willing to try anything to end it. (Ask my husband about my manifestation candle.) Andrews can attest to that. “At first, I was overwhelmed by how many [supplements were recommended], but when you want it so bad — you want to be healthy, you want to get good follicles, you want to get good eggs, you want to get good results — I was like, why not take them all?”
Regardless, because of her cancer, the couple didn’t even know if Andrews would be able to carry a child. “We were just trying to get as many as we could get, to see if me getting pregnant was even possible. I wasn’t making a lot of eggs, and we didn’t have a lot of embryos.”
Ultimately, they made the difficult decision to go another route: Eager to find a way out of this heartbreaking battle, the couple turned to surrogacy.
“It was something we hoped in the beginning to avoid — that instead I would miraculously become pregnant, and the whole situation would change, but it didn’t,” Andrews says. “It wasn’t until Covid in 2020, when we were in isolation, that we finally said, ‘We need to do this.’”
Unfortunately, infertility is never fully spelled out ahead of time: You uncover so much along the way. Doctors tend to emphasize the positive possibilities — or maybe that’s how it sounds to patients, because that’s what we want to hear. Andrews recalls being told, “Surrogacy gives you a better chance.” So they transferred two embryos, thinking at the very least one would stick, and maybe they’d have twins. They were shattered when that plan fell through. “We lost two embryos,” she says. “We had false hope — we thought it was going to work because we didn’t realize that about 30 percent of surrogacy transfers don’t work.”
As someone who’s lost a handful of embryos, I understand how devastating an unsuccessful transfer can be for the patient. When an embryo is implanted into your uterus but doesn’t “stick,” it’s effectively a miscarriage, regardless of the clinical, emotionless jargon the nurses use when they call with the news. (If it feels like someone in your life just died, you’d be right.)
“I had to get help,” says Andrews. “The day we found out that the transfer didn’t work, I called my friends and was like, ‘I can’t feel my legs.’ I was so messed up over it.” Andrews didn’t confront the loss at first: “I didn’t process it. I was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine. We’ll get through it.’ It was not fine. A month later, I was having problems forming sentences. I was just not dealing with my grief properly. I had to talk to somebody.”
My natural next question was how she’s still standing after 10 years of this, when I’m crumbling after 2.5. She credits her work, which she threw herself into as an escape. “I looked at it as an outlet to get the hell away from my reality.” Of course, she leaned on her partner a lot, too; she gets teary-eyed recalling the time he came home from work to be with her on the day their last embryo was transferred to their surrogate. She also felt a release when she started talking about her situation openly. “I wish it was in our [cultural] conversation more than it is. People need to talk more about it because these fertility clinic waiting rooms are packed. It took my ninth try to be like, F*ck this. I’m going to be open about this. I’m tired of being so strong. If I get one more vial of blood drawn, I’m going to scream.”
Now, with a six-month-old at home, Andrews is facing a battle of a very different kind: new motherhood by means of surrogacy. “It’s hard to get there,” she says, “[and] it’s hard right now having Mack.”
As we wrap up, the conversation rolls back around to me, and she offers me some hope to hold onto as I face this uphill battle that she’s closer to the other side of.
Now I’m in tears as she says, “It’s going to work for you. It just sucks because you don’t know when. And that’s incredibly unfair. But it’s going to work.” I replied, “I hope by the time this article comes out, we’re closer to that.”
“Me too,” Andrews said in earnest. “Thinking of you.”
A few days later, I found out I was miscarrying the embryo we transferred — and I haven’t gotten pregnant since. To say this isn’t the outcome I’d hoped for would be an understatement. But in the isolating cycle of infertility, getting Erin Andrews as a cheerleader isn’t the worst consolation prize.
