Erin Andrews and How She Beat Cervical Cancer – Cervical Cancer Month

Airing: Episode 478, Week of Saturday January 19, 2019
It is a very grim statistic – every two hours a woman dies from cervical cancer. With that in mind January is cervical Health Awareness Month.
Someone you may not be aware of who has suffered from cervical cancer is sports reporter and Dancing with the Stars host, Erin Andrews. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016 and has successfully beat the disease. We’re happy to have her with us along with Dr. Jessica Shepherd to discuss how women can protect themselves against cervical cancer.
Erin was diagnosed a couple of years ago, right before she went back for the NFL season. Erin went and got her exams done with her OBGYN and it ended up happening like week three of the NFL season. She got a text from her doctor that said “you have tested positive for this, and now we have to deal with it”. It was something very hard to deal with.
She was on Dancing with the Stars at the time and working a full NFL schedule and didn’t want to miss a bit of work and kind of wanted to keep it under wraps. She was thankfully able to beat this thing. So she teamed up with Hologic to try to get the message out there that women need to take time out of their very busy schedule. Telling women that they need to make an appointment with their OBGYN and get in and get tested, because if you do test positive for cervical cancer it is treatable and it is preventable.
She had a wonderful relationship with her doctor, she went every year to get her annual and so even though it was detected, it’s preventable and treatable and that’s exactly what she did.
So you know that should send the message to so many women, that at the age of 21 start getting your pap smear and between the ages of 30 to 65 start adding HPV to your PAP testing and making sure that HPV is being screened in your pap smear. It’s really important again, establishing that relationship with your doctor, making sure that you’re taking time for yourself to go to the doctor and ask the questions.
Dr. Shepherd said “get your questions ready, ask and just go get tested because the sooner you get tested, hopefully nothing’s wrong, but if there is you can get in there you can have options for treatment and you can beat.”
It’s great advice and in most cases cervical cancer testing is covered by health insurance. Thanks so much to Erin Andrews and Dr. Shepherd for sharing with us.
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