Fox News Meteorologist Janice Dean Reflects on Living with Multiple Sclerosis for 20 Years: ‘I’m a Better Person’ (Exclusive).Linh

By the fall of 2005, Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean felt like the world was finally turning her way. “I was 35, I had just gotten my job at Fox, I had a great boyfriend . . . it all felt like a dream come true,” says Dean. So when she started feeling unusually fatigued, she didn’t think a lot about it.

“I just kind of chalked it up to working too much, not taking care of myself, that kind of thing,” she says.

Then in October, during a trip home to Ottawa to introduce her boyfriend to her family, her nagging fatigue suddenly became overwhelming. “I woke up one morning and literally couldn’t get out of bed,” says Dean. “It was like nothing I had ever felt before. Like I had this weighted blanket on me. I couldn’t feel the bottoms of my feet, and I also had this weird numbness in my thighs. I was like, ‘What is wrong with me?’ ”

After a series of tests including an MRI and a spinal tap, doctors delivered a staggering diagnosis: Dean had multiple sclerosis, a chronic auto-immune disease that is believed to affect as many as 1 million Americans.

“It was the shock of a lifetime,” says Dean. “I remember just feeling all of it was going to end: that my boyfriend was going to leave me, that I would be in a wheelchair, and I wouldn’t be able to do my job at Fox. All of my dreams kind of came crashing down.”

Now, almost two decades later, Dean can look back with gratitude that none of those things came to pass. She and that boyfriend, New York City firefighter Sean Newman, have been married since 2007, she’s celebrating her 20th year at Fox (she’s now also a contributor to Fox Weather), and new treatment options have kept her MS flare-ups mostly under control.

“I’m still standing,” she says. “Better than standing. And I sometimes think I’m a better person because of the diagnosis, if that makes any sense. This made me realize what was important in life, like your health and your family and your support system.”

Dean, now 54, has also become a prominent voice in the MS community, sharing her own story and reaching out to others who have been diagnosed with the disease, which is characterized by the immune system attacking the protective myelin coating the fibers of the central nervous system. The resulting lesions, or scar tissue, disrupt communication between nerves and the brain.

 “Janice is a warrior,” says her neurologist Dr. Tracy DeAngelis. “She does not allow MS to call the shots in her life. She listens to her body, she rests when she needs to, and she’s a fierce advocate for her- self and others.”

But learning to live with MS has been a journey for Dean. In the early days after her diagnosis, “I had people saying, ‘Don’t tell anybody. That’s going to ruin your career,’ ” she recalls. She found a supportive shoulder in her Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto, who had himself been diagnosed with MS in 1997.

“I called him, and he said, ‘Come to my office,’ ” recalls Dean. “And he just turned off the TVs, sat me right down, and pulled out the Kleenex. I remember him saying, ‘You’re going to be okay, and I’m going to be here for whatever you need.’ ” Cavuto reassured her that their bosses would be supportive as well. “He said if they have to build his-and-her wheelchair ramps on-set, they will,” she recalls. “I had somebody who could hold my hand, and I was so grateful for that.”

While the births of her two sons, Matthew in 2009 and Theodore in 2011, offered brief respites in her MS battle — “We don’t quite know why, but women who are pregnant rarely have big flare-ups,” says Dean — explaining her disease to her boys was its own challenge. Fortunately she got an unexpected assist from a teacher at their elementary school who also has MS.

“I remember Matthew coming home and saying, ‘Today Mrs. Klein told us about this thing that she has called MS,’ ” says Dean. “It was this whole speech about how she was in a wheelchair, but it wasn’t stopping her from doing what she loved. And I had tears in my eyes, because I was like, ‘God gave me this moment.’ And I said, ‘Listen, I have the same thing as Mrs. Klein.’ ”