Photo courtesy of Fox News Channel

Well-known US Fox News reporter Shannon Bream, a former lawyer and crowned beauty queen, battled through 18 months of excruciating pain and chronic fatigue as a result of undiagnosed recurring corneal erosions (epithelial basement membrane dystrophy).

In a Washington Post interview, Bream described how it started in 2010, waking her up with a pain in her left eye “so searing it sat me straight up in bed”. Her eye was tearing profusely but after a few hours, the pain and tearing subsided. After a few recurring episodes, Bream sought help from her optometrist who suggested she could be suffering from dry eye and prescribed lubricating eye drops. When the problem kept recurring, the optometrist referred Bream to an ophthalmologist.

Bream said she turned to a respected corneal specialist in Virginia who agreed that dryness was the most likely cause and prescribed Restasis, a treatment for chronic dry eye. Initially, this helped ease the pain, said Bream, but then the pain and tearing became more frequent, with both eyes suffering episodes several times a week.

Her ophthalmologist urged her to be patient, but after several months, Bream said she was getting desperate; waking every two or three hours a night to put in her eye drops, and existing in a perpetual state of chronic fatigue and pain. She returned again to her ophthalmologist, but again he told her to be patient and said she was probably overreacting and “emotional”. This was a devastating blow, Bream told the Washington Post, adding by then she had started to doubt she would ever find relief. But her husband urged her to seek advice from a different ophthalmologist and Bream reluctantly set up an appointment with a Washington corneal specialist.

Anxious at the prospect of not being taken seriously, Bream described her immense relief when during the examination, the specialist explained he could see her cornea was covered with tiny, superficial scratches and signs of a disorder called map-dot-fingerprint dystrophy, featuring clusters of dots resembling fingerprints on layers of the cornea.

The Washington cornea specialist explained the condition, most common in people aged 40-70, results in cellular abnormalities causing the corneal epithelium to weakly adhere to the underlying membrane, exposing the underlying nerves, which can be excruciatingly painful.

Several weeks later, as Bream’s eyes had finally begun to heal using the ointment and eye drops prescribed, she said she slept a whole night for the first time in a year.

“It felt like I’d won the $300 million lottery,” she said.