She looks calm and composed on TV — but behind the scenes, Fox News anchor Shannon Bream has battled agonizing pain, misdiagnosis, and private heartbreaks she carried in silence.
For years, Shannon Bream showed up on camera with poise. But what viewers didn’t know was that she was waking up every night in blinding pain from a mysterious eye condition no doctor seemed to understand.
“It felt like someone was slashing my eyeball with a hot poker,” she revealed. “I couldn’t get any rest.”
Shannon Bream / Facebook
She survived by setting alarms every two hours to apply eye drops — just to keep the pain at bay. For two years, she lived like this: working through the day, suffering through the night, and hiding it all from colleagues at Fox. The only person who knew the full story was her husband, Sheldon Bream.
Doctors Dismissed Her. She Kept Going Anyway.
When Bream finally saw a specialist, she hoped for answers. Instead, she got dismissed.
“You’re very emotional,” the doctor told her — a remark that nearly broke her.
“It was all I could do to get to my car before I burst into tears,” she later wrote.
Feeling misunderstood, exhausted, and without a diagnosis, Bream began spiraling into depression. She confided in students during a speech at Liberty University that her mental health had taken a dark turn.
“I felt the walls closing in,” she said. “I had no answers. Nothing but chronic pain and a mystery.”
Online, she found forums of others living with similar agony — some of whom had talked openly about ending their lives. She admitted she understood the feeling.
“I couldn’t imagine living another 40 years like this.”
But her husband pushed her to keep searching. Eventually, Bream found Dr. Thomas Clinch, who diagnosed her with epithelial basement membrane dystrophy and recurrent corneal erosions — a rare condition that causes the cornea to tear spontaneously, often multiple times per day.
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There’s no cure. But at last, she had a name for what she was fighting — and a plan to manage it.
Then Came Cancer. And Criticism.
Not long after reclaiming her health, Bream was diagnosed with breast cancer during a routine mammogram. She went in for a checkup, and left with a life-changing diagnosis. A biopsy confirmed it. She underwent surgery immediately.
