Tori Carmen, a popular young news anchor based in Greenville, South Carolina is speaking out about a harrowing brain cancer diagnosis that interrupted her wedding plans and temporarily derailed her career.
Around a year ago, the 37-year-old told her Fox Carolina viewers she would be away from the air for a few months. Now that she’s pulled through, she’s speaking out to People about what she went through, saying, “my biggest goal is to help other people, because what happened to me was so out of the blue and terrifying.”
Tori Carmen Describes Telltale Brain Cancer Symptoms: ‘I Woke Up Screaming’
Carmen told People the first signs of her brain cancer were easily overlooked. Chills and weakness after coming returning from a ski trip where she’d felt a bit off made her think she was coming down with the flu.
However, the next signs were impossible to ignore. “In the middle of the night on February 28, I woke up screaming. I had a seizure. My whole right side locked up. I couldn’t move my leg,” she recalls. She couldn’t even speak to answer her fiancé, Jeremy, when he woke up and asked what was going on. “I couldn’t even speak. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t scream anymore. I just fell into darkness. It was like a black hole taking me under. I thought I was dying,” she says.
She says she had a seizure and went limp before passing out, waking up just in time to see EMTs arriving, who rushed her to the hospital.
She says being told by doctors they’d found a mass in her brain was “a gut punch.” She was originally told the mass appeared to be a benign type of tumor called a meningioma, but testing after a craniotomy to remove it revealed it was a grade 3 meningioma, which is malignant.
Now facing a diagnosis of aggressive cancer, the glamorous anchor says she was told, ““In order to live a long life, you need to get radiation on your brain.”
Thankfully, a PET scan revealed there was no cancer remaining in her brain. Explaining her decision to proceed with gamma knife radiation, she reflects, “We weren’t going to just wait and watch; we didn’t want to risk it coming back. I had the targeted radiation done on May 30, 2025.”
Tori Carmen Returned to the Air 2 Months After Completing Her Cancer Treatment
Carmen tells People, “I wasn’t on air until July. I used to do four shows a night. Now I’m just doing the 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. news to give myself a better work-life balance and to get to sleep earlier at night and to have time for appointments.”
Although she’s in the clear for now, she still has to do regular follow-up. She shared that she has MRIs every 3 months to make sure the cancer hasn’t returned. As a gym fanatic who enjoyed HIIT sessions and long walks before her diagnosis, she’s happy to be back into her normal routine. She also says she and Jeremy are planning a do-over wedding after previously rushing to get married at the Sheriff’s office amid her health scare. “I have hope for the future,” she concludes.
