Fox News anchor Bret Baier shared an update on his 17-year-old son, Paul, who recently underwent his fifth surgery to treat congenital heart defects he has battled since birth.
The Special Report host offered a glimpse into his family’s journey, welcoming People reporters into his private life as he continues to support Paul through each stage of recovery. “His heart was essentially pumping the wrong way, and we didn’t know before birth,” Baier explained about his son, who was born on June 29, 2007.
Paul underwent his first open-heart surgery as an infant, followed by three more procedures at 10 months, 6 years, and 13 years old. Doctors initially believed the fourth surgery would be his last until well into his 20s—but fate had other plans.
In 2024, a routine cold led Paul’s mother, Amy, to take him in for a chest X-ray and MRI. It was during that visit that the family received another frightening diagnosis. “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,’ ” Bret told the outlet at the time. “And they didn’t know whether it might burst, but if it did, it might have been fatal in a matter of minutes.”
“It was exponentially more stressful and emergent, and we weren’t prepared for it,” he said shorty before Father’s Day. “This happened literally within 12 hours…so it was a heavy lift.” Fortunately, Paul came through the surgery safely and has not experienced any complications since, according to his famous father.
“The recovery was awesome. The doctors and nurses at Children’s National [Hospital, in Washington D.C.], as always, were fantastic,” Bret said, praising his son’s medical team. “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.”
“He may have to have little things going forward, angioplasties, which are not little, but it’s exponentially less than an open heart surgery,” he adds. “Bottom line is, we want him to be a normal kid,” Bret said of his and Amy’s hopes for Paul in the years to come. “Seventeen years ago, we would be really, really happy to be right here — after that first surgery as a baby.”
The Fox News anchor acknowledged that Paul has “missed a lot of school” due to extended hospital stays but shared that he recently completed his junior year coursework and has now started exploring four-year college options.