Maria Menounos says she began “guttural crying” after hearing about her cancer diagnosis – assuming that meant she wouldn’t be able to meet her baby.
“I hadn’t really cried, 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 going to meet her?’” the entertainment journalist told Hoda Kotb during Thursday’s “Today” show.
Menounos and husband Keven Undergaro are expecting their first child via surrogate after battling fertility issues for a decade.
“When it’s on your pancreas, you know you’re not going to be OK,” Menounos said as she began to cry.
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Menounos, 44, said she and Undergaro, 55, were “devastated” hearing the news following months of tests that turned up nothing despite her ongoing abdominal pain.
The former E! personality said she and her husband changed their attitudes after realizing they were assuming “the worst.”
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“The more I thought about it, I was like, ‘This doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense,’” she told Kotb.
“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?’”
Menounos immediately had surgery to remove part of her pancreas, her entire spleen and 17 lymph nodes — as well as a fibroid “the size of a baby” on her uterus — and is officially cancer-free.
“I feel so blessed and so grateful because I’ve been given so many miracles,” she said, referring to her surgery to remove a benign brain tumor in 2017.
“I’m so so blessed, and I know that other people can be, too.”
The “Heal Squad” host implored viewers to be the “CEOs” of their bodies and take control of their health.
“You cannot give that over to anybody. That job is yours,” she shared. “You know your body. You know what’s going on.”
