Tamsen Fadal remembers the exact moment she realized it was time to leave her longtime home at New York’s WPIX. While seated in the anchor’s chair one Friday night in 2019, the Emmy-winning face of the PIX11 Evening News suddenly felt her body temperature rise to inferno levels as her heartbeat quickened with increasing intensity.

“I didn’t know what I was going through,” Fadal, 53, tells TVNewser five years after that fateful newscast—the first one she failed to complete after 25 years on the air.