A chronic eye condition causing constant, agonizing pain, left Fox News anchor Shannon Bream so inconsolable that she even contemplated suicide.
Although hard to imagine for most of us, such phenomena are not unheard of. Rare cluster headaches are notoriously painful and relentless, far worse than migraines and sometimes drag on for so long, victims must be constantly watched for fear of suicide.
In Bream’s case, excruciating pain (like someone repeatedly stabbed her in the eyes) left the Fox News star debilitated and exhausted until she found hope in a new treatment.
People Magazine has more:
After struggling for almost two years, the doctor she was seeing did not have any answers. “He told me he thought I was being too emotional,” she says.
It was not what she wanted to hear. “That put me into a tailspin — I’m desperate for any lifeline any diagnosis, any treatment to help me through this nightmare, and my doctor was questioning my sanity. That was really hurtful,” she says. “I felt like no one was going to help me.”
…
“There were people talking about how the only way out was to take their own life. And that didn’t seem crazy or unreasonable to me at all. I was two years into it. I was in my early 40s, and I said, ‘No way I could life another 40 years like that. If all of my waking hours are in pain, what is the point of going on?’”
She started thinking about how nice it would be to go to sleep and not wake up.
Fortunately, Bream confided in her husband who promised they would spend every last dime they had to find a cure together.
One of America’s top eye surgeons, Dr. Thomas Clinch diagnosed Bream with “chronic erosion syndrome exacerbated by corneal map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy,” a chronic but treatable condition.
Within a few weeks, the effects of her treatment enabled Bream to sleep fully through the night for the first time in two years. Seven hours with no pain felt like nothing short of a miracle.
Before launching her primetime show at FNC in 2017, Fox News at Night, Bream returned to Dr. Clinch who performed laser surgery that corrected Bream’s vision and alleviated her severely dry eyes.
“It really gave me my life back,” Bream concluded. “My eyes are never going to be perfect. But they’re 95 percent better. I do occasionally have a little pain here and there overnight. It’s nothing, nothing like the pain I had before. It actually will subside in five minutes and I go back to sleep. It’s not hours and hours and double vision and triggering migraines. It’s very minor and very infrequent.”
AAN Staff
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