It’s been almost two-and-a-half years since doctors diagnosed Dancing With the Stars host Erin Andrews with cervical cancer and now that she’s healthy and cancer-free, the 40-year-old star is opening up about how her battle made her relationship with her husband, former professional hockey player Jarrett Stoll, unbreakable.

“I think if anything it got us stronger,” Erin recently told Entertainment Tonight in a new interview. “He went to a lot of doctors’ meetings, saw a lot of diagrams and sat there. And this is a guy who cares about winning face-offs and winning penalty kills and so forth, and he was like, ‘We got this, we got this.’ It made conversations about having babies very real and candid for him and our life and everything. So he was amazing.”

Although Erin was diagnosed with cervical cancer in September 2016, the sportscaster didn’t share publicly share her health news with fans until January 2017 because it was a secret she didn’t know how to reveal. ‘”Uh, what?’ That was what went through my mind,” she said about her reaction to the scary diagnosis. “It was football season and when you hear from your doctor on a Saturday it’s not good. It’s like, ‘Oh boy what’s this text coming in?’ I think a whole numbness went all over my body. I couldn’t feel my arms for a hot second, I ran out of the conference room I was in, took the call, got my family on it, and I was just like, ‘What are you saying?’ I do remember saying that to my gyno at the time, saying, ‘What am I supposed to tell my family?'”

The first thing that popped into Erin’s mind was her career. “[My] initial [reaction was] shock, fear, crying, [thinking], ‘Does this mean I’m not going to work this year?’ We had the Super Bowl that year, I want to do the Super Bowl, I have Dancing With the Stars,'” she recalled. As she started to calm down, Erin said she began thinking of ways to overcome her diagnosis. “It went into problem-solving. How do we fix this? How do we take care of this and fast?” she said.

Erin Andrews on the field before a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins
Getty Images

Luckily, Erin had her hubby by her side the entire time. And when she was recovering from surgeries, Jarrett, 36, was always there to cheer her up. “As I remember, I’m on the couch and my first surgery didn’t go well,” the blonde beauty began. “I was just bawling my brains out and I had to get on a red-eye flight that night to Green Bay, Wisconsin because I wasn’t going to miss my sit-down interview with Jordy Nelson, and I wasn’t going to miss Dallas [Cowboys] at Green Bay [Packers]. I was screaming, crying and I remember my husband being like, ‘It’s OK, babe, we got this. We’re going to beat this. We got this.'”‘

Today, Erin said “it feels great” to be cancer-free and gushed that she couldn’t have gotten through this health battle without Jarrett’s unwavering support. “My family has been through so much with everything that I’ve been through in my life, and it’s just like, they need a break,” she said. “My husband, that was a lot to deal with, and I don’t really like dealing with the things like this in my life.”