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The worst fear a parent can face is outliving their child — and Fox News anchor Bret Baier and his wife came dangerously close to living that nightmare when their son Paul underwent his fifth open-heart surgery last year.
Now 17, Paul Baier is sharing his journey with the world through a new podcast titled One Step at a Time.
Paul was born on June 29, 2007, with complex congenital heart defects. He had his first surgery as an infant, followed by operations at 10 months, 6 years, 13 years — and again in April 2024 after a terrifying turn no one saw coming.
“His heart was essentially pumping the wrong way, and we didn’t know before birth,” Bret told People.
Doctors initially believed Paul wouldn’t need another surgery until his 20s. But after catching a common cold last year, a chest X-ray and MRI revealed a life-threatening aneurysm the size of a golf ball.
“The MRI comes back, and they sit me down and say, ‘This is a really big deal. This is an aneurysm the size of a golf ball that has formed off of his heart,’ ” Baier recalled. “And they didn’t know whether it might burst, but if it did, it might have been fatal in a matter of minutes.”
Baier, 54, said the family had almost no time to process the news.
“It was exponentially more stressful and emergent, and we weren’t prepared for it,” he said. “This happened literally within 12 hours…so it was a heavy lift.”
Paul made it through the emergency surgery and hasn’t had complications since.
“The recovery was awesome. The doctors and nurses at Children’s National [Hospital, in Washington D.C.], as always, were fantastic,” Bret said. “And Paul is in the mind space [that] he just plows through it now. And I think, knock on wood, that that’s the end of the open-heart surgeries.”
