Fans were concerned for Pam Oliver after hearing a few of the reports she delivered during Sunday’s Week 16 game between the Green Bay Packers and Miami Dolphins.
Oliver, a veteran reporter, did not sound like her usual self while delivering a few reports during the second quarter for FOX:
Pam Oliver not sounding great pic.twitter.com/erMpC3hzh6
— sportsvids99 (@sportsvids991) December 25, 2022
Here was another report:
Pam Oliver sounds wasted pic.twitter.com/O5CSUC8rrS
— sportsvids99 (@sportsvids991) December 25, 2022
Oliver’s cadence and speech was not smooth, which led to some concern from fans. The same thing happened with Oliver during a divisional playoff game for the 2020 season.
So what is going on? We don’t know for certain, but Oliver has opened up in the past about her battles with debilitating migraines.
The FOX reporter suffers from severe migraines, which sometimes affect her while she is working. Though she has mostly been able to fight through them, they have been bad enough to cause her to miss games at times.
“Well, I’ve had several [migraines] over the course of the football season,” Oliver said of her migraines during a November 2021 interview with Richard Deitsch. “For example, I’ve gone from averaging 5-6 a month down to averaging 3 a month. I consider that being lucky. They’re very debilitating for me. They’ve been a problem for a very, very long time. It’s caused me to miss a few games over the span of my career because I just couldn’t take the noise and the light and the sickness that comes with that. The nausea and the vomiting.
“There was one game, about three-four years ago. I live in Atlanta. I was minutes from Mercedez-Benz [Stadium]. My driver, I said, you gotta pull over. We were less than five minutes from the stadium. I’m hurling. My head is pounding. And I made the decision right then and there, I’m no good to anyone. There’s no way that I felt like I was gonna get through that game, be productive, help the crew, contribute in any way. So, turned around and I went home. I felt so guilty about that for the longest time, but they really do knock me out of action.
“I feel like they’ve gotten better, just from the standpoint of having fewer. But they definitely are real. And they continue to plague me. And not to have people feel sorry for me, but that’s just the way it is. That’s just part of my health issue.”
Understanding the health issues she sometimes has to battle through puts the reports she delivered on Sunday into context.
