Shannon Bream Shares The Private Battles She’s Faced For Years

If you had to use one word to describe Shannon Bream, what would it be? Most people would choose strong or perhaps beautiful, but there is something going on behind the scenes that they may not realize.

Shannon Bream was a television personality who showed strength when she was in front of the camera. As a Fox News anchor, she was often seen by people with a smile on her face, looking poised and ready to go.

What they may not know, however, is that every night she would wake up in extreme pain because of an eye condition that doctors were not able to figure out. She said: “It felt like someone was slashing my eyeball with a hot poker.

“I couldn’t get any rest.”

Every two hours, she would wake up from an alarm to put eyedrops in. That seemed to keep the pain at a bearable level, but she lived like that for two years.

Every day, she would go to work and sit in front of the camera, hiding what she was going through from the public and from her colleagues at Fox. At night, she was struggling just to get by.

The only one who knew what was really going on was her husband, Sheldon. Doctors who knew about it just shrugged her off, but she continued to go back because she wanted answers.

Finally, Bream was able to get to see a specialist. She was hoping to get an answer, but instead, she was sent away.

The doctor told her: “You’re very emotional.”

She said: “It was all I could do to get to my car before I burst into tears.”

At this point, she was living without a diagnosis and nobody seemed to understand what was happening. She started to go into a depression and while giving a speech at Liberty University, she confided in students to say that her mental health was in a bad place.

She said: “I felt the walls closing in. I had no answers. Nothing but chronic pain and a mystery.”

When she found forms of others who felt something similar online, she noticed that some were talking about putting an end to it all. She admitted that she understood how they felt.

She said: “I couldn’t imagine living another 40 years like this.”

Her husband, who stood by her side, told her to continue to look. Eventually, she was able to get to Dr. Thomas Clinch, who gave her a diagnosis. It was epithelial basement membrane dystrophy and recurrent corneal erosions, a rare condition in which the cornea would tear spontaneously, sometimes many times per day.

There isn’t a cure, but now she at least had an understanding of what she was dealing with.

She was just getting her health to a more acceptable level when she was diagnosed with breast cancer during a routine mammogram. That life-changing diagnosis, along with a biopsy, sent her into surgery without delay.

She didn’t tell anyone about the diagnosis at first and only a few of her coworkers knew what she was dealing with. She went back to work and tried to work through the recovery. Doctors told her that she was genetically predisposed so she had a high risk of recurrence.

Before she got married, her husband, Sheldon, was diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. He went through a nine-hour surgery to remove it but developed facial paralysis, which later resolved.

In 2013, she lost her father to sudden death. It happened so quickly that she felt she didn’t get closure and wasn’t able to say goodbye.

Bream is thought of as being a calm and fair-minded individual, but she also faces some difficulty. This is especially true with the politics today.

During live Trump trial coverage, she was pressing attorney Alina Habba over the possibility that the prosecution was being orchestrated by Pres. Biden. The attorney was not happy, and Donald Trump lashed out at her publicly.

He wrote: “I never knew Shannon Bream was so naïve. HOW STUPID!”

Through it all, she has remained a pillar of strength, not only to those around her but to her closest family as well. She has faced many trials in life, but she has come through all of them.