Maria Menounos is opening up about her harrowing struggle with stage 2 pancreatic cancer as she awaits the arrival of her first child.
The former host of "Extra" and "E! News" said that the mass on her pancreas that her doctors found in January had nearly doubled in size in two months amid a spate of health issues before she was officially diagnosed.
Appearing on this week's episode of Dear Media's "Not Skinny But Not Fat" podcast, Menounos told host Amanda Hirsch that she was "f— gutted" over the possibility of never meeting her daughter due to her health crisis.
"I was just guttural crying and I was like I can't believe God just blessed me with a baby, I'm gonna have a baby," the 45-year-old, who was nine-weeks post-op when the episode was recorded.
"We were two months along in the surrogacy and I'm like I can't believe I'm finally going to have a baby and I'm not going to get to meet her. Because what we also found out was that when they found the tumor on the MRI, I said, 'Can we go back and get the records and look at the November scan? I bet it was there.' And it was.
"At that point, it was two centimeters and then by the time they found it, it was almost four centimeters. It had doubled in size in two months."
The "Entourage" and "One Tree Hill" actor said she's "still healing" from that information and is trying to get to the bottom of why the tumor wasn't flagged earlier, explaining the complicated process to determine which scan is appropriate in each circumstance.
"My through line has always been to help people and to share information and so I'm doing both of those," Menounos said, later adding, "it would be such a pity to be 'woe is me' when God's granted me so many miracles."
In May, the "Heal Squad x Maria Menounos" podcast host revealed that she had been secretly battling pancreatic cancer and successfully underwent surgery to remove a 3.9-centimeter tumor. She thought she "was a goner," she told People magazine, but was OK because it was caught "early enough."
The TV personality's revelation came just months after she announced that she and husband, AfterBuzz TV creator Keven Undergaro, were expecting a baby girl via surrogate after nearly a decade of fertility issues. The baby is due this summer.
Despite the tolls on her physical and mental health, she has since turned her attention to helping others seek answers to their health problems. Her show, she told Hirsch, has become her "accountability partner to make health a priority in our life because no one teaches us that health is that important."
Menounos has been open for years about her health struggles, including the autoimmune disease Hashimoto's and dealing with other, hormonal tumors. She was diagnosed with and was treated for a benign brain tumor in 2017, not long after her late mother battled brain cancer. She said that she started having severe leg cramps and "inconsolable" pain last summer that resulted in a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, which runs in her family. Menounos told People that she was prescribed insulin, went on a strict diet, began monitoring her glucose levels and dramatically improved.
But by November, she was back in the hospital complaining of excruciating abdominal pain coupled with diarrhea.
Test results and a CT scan were inconclusive and Menounos said her pain persisted and sometimes felt "like someone was tearing my insides out." Then, the private diagnostic company Prenuvo reached out to her show and convinced her to have a full body MRI. The scan showed that she had a mass on her pancreas and a biopsy later confirmed that it was a cancerous Stage 2 pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
However, the prognosis was good and she had surgery earlier this year to remove part of her pancreas, her spleen, a large fibroid and 17 lymph nodes. She told Hirsch that , it resulted in her going back on insulin to manage her diabetes.
"I still haven't come to grips with it all, including the fact that so very few even survive pancreatic cancer," Menounos wrote in a May 3 Instagram post. "I have SO much information and SO many breakthroughs that I think/hope can save others. I do plan to share everything on my podcast and on as many platforms as I can.
"For now I'll say how grateful I am to be able alive and well and that I WILL get to hold my baby!"
