After a nine-year struggle with infertility, Erin Andrews was more than ready to meet her baby boy. But she wasn’t sure she should be in the delivery room when her surrogate gave birth.
“I’m not going to lie, I’m really sick to my stomach and I’ve been known to pass out,” Andrews, 45, told TODAY.com in an interview ahead of his July 14 TODAY Show appearance.
But on June 28, the NFL reporter found herself sprinting through the halls of the hospital to witness the birth of her first child.
After years of waiting and hoping, Andrews and her husband, retired NHL player Jarret Stoll, were moments away from becoming parents.
“She expanded very, very quickly. And it felt like it was actually happening,” says Andrews. The sportscaster, who was still nervous about passing out and “causing a commotion,” said she decided to stand next to Stoll, but the surrogate had other ideas.
“The nurse said, ‘She wants to hold your hand,'” Andrews recalled. “So I went and grabbed her hand – and she had this tear coming out of her eye.”
Stoll, 41, joined his wife of six years at the surrogate’s bedside.
“We love the sport so much in our family and we cheered on her like she was our quarterback,” Andrews says. They didn’t applaud for long.
“She pushed once and he came out!” Andrews said.
Andrews can’t stop staring at a photo taken moments after the birth of his son Mack.
“I kiss (the surrogate’s) head and Jarret looks like he’s winning the Stanley Cup again,” she said. “It’s the perfect picture of surrogacy.”
Erin Andrews’ path to parenthood
Years ago, after several failed rounds of IVF, Andrews says she developed a routine. Instead of telling Stoll they weren’t pregnant, she just told him where she was and what she was eating.
“I would call him and say, ‘I’m back in the McDonald’s drive-thru again, having a breakfast sandwich with sausage biscuits because we just had some bad news,’ she says.
“It was 10 years of hell,” she adds.
After Andrews was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016, her oncologist recommended that she and Stoll freeze the embryos. Andrews underwent two surgeries and was declared cancer-free, but she and Stoll decided to pursue IVF in case the cancer returned.
In 2021, as Andrews was about to undergo her seventh round of IVF, she opened up about the physical and emotional toll of infertility treatments.
“You feel like s—. You feel bloated and hormonal for a week and a half. You could go through this whole experience and get absolutely nothing out of it – that’s the craziest part,” he said. she wrote in an essay for Facebook, “It’s a ton of money, it’s a ton of time, it’s a ton of mental and physical anguish. And more often than not, they fail.”
Andrews and Stoll would later suffer a devastating pregnancy loss.
“We lost twins through surrogacy and it was really difficult,” she says. “I really struggled mentally. I didn’t handle it very well… I kind of tried to put it aside and pretend like everything was fine.”
Everything was wrong. Andrews remembers breaking down on the tarmac of a plane shortly after her last transfer from IVF.
“I just couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “(Mack) was our golden embryo. He was our last hope.
First weeks of motherhood with baby Mack
Asked about her first two weeks of motherhood, Andrews says she’s still finding her footing.
“I want the connection with him. I can’t wait for chemistry. You know, I’m so far from being motherly in my life because I’m on a soccer field and I work with men,” she explains.
“I keep watching him. I want to study everything about him,” she said. “I want to make up for lost time”
Andrews says she is grateful to the women, including NBC’s Kristen Welker, who have spoken out about infertility and their own path to surrogacy. Welker and her husband, John Hughes, welcomed their daughter Margot with the help of a surrogate in 2021.
“There are so many things about Kristen’s story that really stuck with me. She must always be ‘on’, and all the while she gets some bad news about another failed tryout,” Andrews says. , recalling times when she should have had to show courage for television while collapsing inside. “I had that many times.”
Andrews says she is “paying it forward” by sharing her story of her own struggles. Talking to others who had been through infertility, IVF and surrogacy, she says, really helped her and Stoll through their darkest times.
“Going through this whole trip, you think you’re alone,” she says. “You’re not alone.”
This article originally appeared on TODAY.com