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.”
“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 added.
Paul has missed significant time in school due to his hospital stays, but he just finished his junior year of high school and is starting to look at colleges.
“Bottom line is, we want him to be a normal kid,” Baier said. “Seventeen years ago, we would be really, really happy to be right here — after that first surgery as a baby.”
“While we have in the back of our minds, [that he’s] been through all of this and we’re afraid of whatever could happen, we also know that it’s better for him to be a normal kid and to be with his friends and to drive when they drive,” he continued.
“He does sports, he’s very active, and once we got over that last hurdle last year, it’s back to normal, so he’s still beating up his little brother and the whole thing.”
“Everybody has something they’re dealing with in their family,” he said. “This was our something.”
This week, Baier had a strong reaction after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims regarding the Obama administration.
“Now, this is the Trump investigation and this is what they’re putting out here. Separately, Chuck Grassley has put out these files on the Hillary Clinton email case — which are really eye-opening, as well — and a lot of it is redacted. But I talked about both of those things with Comey back in 2018. There was a major disparity,” Baier said.
“And in the middle of this, you have the Page and Strzok, the two lovers at FBI, who are, they come out with these texts of how biased they are against President Trump; and they’re in charge of the investigation,” he said.