Maria Menounos will never forget her radiologist's reaction after an MRI revealed in January that she had a mass on her pancreas.
"He's like, 'Oh,'" the former E! correspondent told Hoda Kotb on the May 4 episode of Today. "And the mass kept persisting in every image. He goes, 'You need to go to the hospital right away.' He's, like, white as a ghost. He's shaking.'"
And Menounos—who is expecting a baby girl via surrogate with her husband Keven Undergaro—feared the worst. "My eyes started to well and I just looked at him and I go, 'So, I'm a goner. Cool,'" she recalled. "Like, I just kind of go to jokes fast. But it was not a good joke. All that kept flashing through my head was my baby."
The mass, Menounos previously told People, was 3.9 cm and was later confirmed to be a stage 2 pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. The entertainment journalist—who has shared her road to motherhood—couldn't believe this was happening with her dream of becoming a mom so close.
"I remember waking up the next morning, and I hadn't really cried," she told Today, "but I just started guttural crying, because I'm like, 'How could God finally bless me with a baby after 10 years, and now I'm not gonna get to meet her?'"
However, Menounos decided to change her mindset.
"The more I thought about it, I was like, 'This doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense,'" the 44-year-old remembered. "And then I realized it doesn't make sense. And that's when I shifted and said, 'I don't know anything, so why am I going to predict the worst? Why am I going to be thinking the worst?' So I said, 'We have to take this step by step.'"
Menounos underwent surgery to remove the cancerous tumor, sharing, "They took the tail of the pancreas, the spleen, 17 lymph nodes and a fibroid the size of like a baby off my uterus."
Today, she is cancer-free. And Menounos hopes her experience can help others. As the Heal Squad podcast host noted, her journey to receiving her diagnosis was a long one, with her experiencing "excruciating pain" months prior to her diagnosis as well as "loose stool for a month and a half." And while she "did all the stool tests" and a CT scan, they didn't show any red flags.
Still, Menounos knew something wasn't right. Even after one doctor initially thought "this was nothing"—suggesting it could be inflammation or pancreatitis—before her biopsy, she continued to seek answers. Now, Menounos—who was also diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes last June and had a benign brain tumor removed in 2017—is reminding others to speak up and advocate for their health.
"I feel so blessed and so grateful because I've been given so many miracles," she told Today. "Like, I'm so, so blessed. And I know that other people can be too. So, my mission is to help people listen to their bodies and learn how to listen to their bodies. And I'm so grateful that God shifted me into this health space with my show and with everything that I do now because I want to sound the alarms to everybody that you have to be the CEO of your health. You cannot give that over to anybody. That job is yours. You know your body. You know what's going on."
And she can't wait to meet her baby later this year.
"I'm grateful that I'm in this position, and I know God made this all happen for me to be able to help other people," she continued. "And I'm just so lucky that I'm going to be able to hold my baby this summer. That's the best blessing of all."
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family).