Fox News has become synonymous with big scandals and controversial hosts (think Sean Hannity and Pete Hegseth), but the network isn’t just home to firebrand anchors. Take Shannon Bream, for example. The Liberty University graduate (who also holds a Juris Doctorate degree from Florida State University College of Law), started her career at Fox News in 2007 as a Supreme Court correspondent. In 2022, she was promoted to “FOX News Sunday” as the show’s first full-time female anchor. As she explained following the announcement, her goal was to push for accountability from politicians on both sides. “What we want to do is have deep, meaningful conversations where people are going to be pressed to express their positions,” she mused, per Variety.

In the years since, that’s exactly what she’s done, even suffering the wrath of Donald Trump with her refusal to accept his team’s claims. As one fan wrote on Facebook, “She is so kind, tolerant and always open to hearing different views on the political spectrum.” That trait likely comes from the fact that Bream doesn’t take her good fortune for granted. She’s been through her share of hardship but has never given up, not even in the darkest of times. This is the tragic truth of Shannon Bream.

Shannon Bream’s husband received a tragic health diagnosis ahead of their nuptials

Shannon Bream/Facebook
Shannon and Sheldon Bream have been happily married since 1995, but as the Fox News host tweeted in 2023, it hasn’t always been easy. “We couldn’t have known the difficult things that would come,” she mused. The most trying have been the numerous health scares the couple has faced through the years, starting with a 24-year-old Sheldon’s brain tumor diagnosis. As Shannon told Fox Nation in 2020, they were planning their wedding when her then-fiance began experiencing a non-stop ringing in his ear. The ailment was first misdiagnosed as an ear infection, but further testing revealed a golf ball-sized tumor. “It just kind of threw our whole world into a tailspin,” Shannon recalled.

Sheldon was quickly scheduled for a nine-hour surgery and, luckily, the mass was fully removed and turned out to be benign. Unfortunately, Sheldon suffered a serious postoperative complication. “All of the swelling from the brain surgery crushed some of his facial nerves and he ended up with severe paralysis,” the news anchor revealed. Recovery was slow and not guaranteed, pushing Sheldon into a depression.

Then, just a month before their nuptials, Shannon noticed her husband-to-be had a small twitch in the corner of his mouth. That, in turn, would lead to recovery. “Thank God he’s good,” she enthused. “No more return of that.”

Doctors didn’t take her extreme eye pain seriously

Years after her husband’s recovery, Shannon Bream would experience her own health diagnosis. In 2010, the then-39-year-old would first experienced a shooting pain in her eye that woke her up at night. “It felt as if someone was slashing my eyeball with a hot poker,” she wrote in a 2018 piece for Women’s Health. While it went away, it soon happened again, leading the on-air personality to visit her optometrist. She was told she had dry eyes, but the pain began occurring more frequently, paired with migraines and double vision.

Bream eventually saw a specialist, but they refused to take her symptoms seriously. “I laid out my daily struggle […] only to have him brush aside my concerns and diagnose me as ’emotional,'” she revealed. Further speaking about that encounter, she told People, “My doctor was questioning my sanity – that was really hurtful.”

Ultimately, it would take two years to receive a concrete diagnosis from a different specialist. After meeting ophthalmologist Thomas Clinch, M.D., Bream learned she had, as she wrote, “a genetic condition that causes my corneas to tear all the time.” While there is no cure, she and her doctor set about finding ways to ease her pain, including surgery in 2017. While recovery was painful, it worked. “Instead of just surviving life and hoping to make it through one more day, I live my life with joy now, and I’m incredibly grateful,” she shared.

Shannon Bream contemplated taking her own life

While searching for an explanation and cure for her chronic eye pain, Shannon Bream was faced with disbelieving healthcare professionals and mounting discomfort. As she would later tell Women’s Health, she was in her early 40s, and the thought of never being able to manage her mystery illness sent her into a spiral. “I couldn’t imagine living another 40 years in endless pain and debilitating fatigue,” she admitted. “Sometimes, I couldn’t see my way through the next 40 seconds.”

Turning to online forums, she found a community of people dealing with the same unexplainable symptoms, some of whom wrote candidly about experiencing suicidal thoughts. “That didn’t seem crazy or unreasonable to me at all,” she confessed. “I felt the walls closing in around me,” she admitted during the 2021 convocation ceremony at her alma mater, Liberty University. “I was just in a shell of depression.”

It wasn’t until Bream told her husband the truth about her darkest thoughts that things began to turn around. He vowed to help her find the right specialist, and soon enough, she met the ophthalmologist who would ultimately help her reach a place where she felt 95 percent better.

Her father died suddenly

Shannon Bream experienced a devastating loss in 2013 when her father, former U.S. Marine Ed DePuy, died suddenly. As she would later share in a 2019 Facebook post, the surprise loss was made all the more painful because “I never got to say goodbye.” However, she did speak to him on the phone just two days earlier and it’s an interaction she would cherish forever. “He told me he was proud of me,” she recalled. That same year, Bream also tweeted about how the pain never fully went away. “It was crushing to not get to say goodbye, and there are days I still ache to call him up,” she confessed. She told followers she initially worried she would forget the sound of her dad’s voice. Luckily, that didn’t happen. “I haven’t, and I remember all the important things he taught me,” she mused.

Since then, she’s continued to think of him regularly while on the job. As she revealed during Fox News’ 25th anniversary celebration in 2021, it was actually DePuy who encouraged her to work for Fox News because it was the network he related to most. “He was so excited when I got my job,” she recalled, noting she still wants talk to him about stories she’s working on. While she’s unable to do that, he’s never far from her mind. “There’s a part of me that feels like he’s looking down [on me because of] his special connection with Fox,” she enthused.

She herself was diagnosed with cancer

Just a few years after she was finally able to find treatment for her chronic eye pain, Shannon Bream received another worrying health diagnosis in 2015. Following a routine mammogram, the Fox News host was sent for a follow-up ultrasound, then a needle biopsy, as her doctor spotted an abnormality.

As she shared on Facebook a year later, waiting for the results was nerve-wracking, and news came several days later while she was at work. “I needed surgery to get the offending tissue out, and there was no delaying,” she recalled. While she initially considered putting off surgery because of her busy schedule, her husband convinced her that her health was more important. She agreed but told almost no one about it and, just four days later, was on the air again. “That kind of work focus was good for me, the only thing that took my mind off the pathology report I was waiting for,” she explained. However, this time around, the news was good. “They got all the tissue they were after, and it was caught very early,” she shared, noting she had made a full recovery but would require regular testing due to a genetic predisposition.

Shannon Bream was publicly insulted by Donald Trump

Shannon Bream has been working at Fox News since 2007, and despite being loyal to the conservative network, she has no qualms about pushing back at questionable claims made by her Republican guests. One such notable incident occurred in May 2024 when Bream interviewed Donald Trump’s lawyer and spokesperson Alina Habba, just as jurors were deliberating over the former president’s hush money trial. Habba (whose relationship with Trump keeps getting weirder) claimed that Joe Biden had somehow orchestrated the whole trial and slammed, “This is exactly a Biden show because he’s got to distract the American people.” Well, that sort of outlandish declaration didn’t sit well with Bream who repeatedly pushed back at Habba, noting how her logic was flawed. “It’s a state trial – the feds passed on these election charges,” Bream calmly explained.

However, that didn’t stop Habba from repeating her statement and, soon enough, Trump himself was on Truth Social, calling Bream’s judgment into question. “I never knew Shannon Bream was so ‘naïve’,” he wrote. “Not only is [Biden] involved, he is virtually leading it, and all of the other Trials as well.”