Former E! News and Extra host Maria Menounos revealed that doctors initially missed the malignant tumor that finally led to her stage-two pancreatic cancer diagnosis, allowing it to double in size in just two months before it was ultimately caught in January.
After an initial CAT scan that came back clean, Menounos returned to the doctors for a full-body MRI, and that’s when the tumor was detected.
“When they found the tumor in the MRI, they said, ‘Can we go back and get the records and look at the November scan? I bet it was there,'” Menounos, 45, told Dear Media’s “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast. “And it was. At that point, it was two centimeters (0.79 inches), and by the time they had found it was almost four centimeters (1.5 inches). It had doubled in size in two months.”
The much-loved media personality said she was “still getting to the bottom” of how such a thing could be missed.
“What I’ve learned since is… different scans have the ability to see different things better,” she explained. “For this, an MRI was what’s really going to see it, for other things CAT scans are better, for others things an ultrasound’s better. It’s a really complicated process.”
“So the radiologist went back and he was able to see it and do an addendum and say, ‘Yes, now with the knowledge it was there, we’re able to see it is there.'” she said.
Her story is a cautionary tale for those who know something isn’t right with their bodies, despite what the doctors are telling them.
Menounos, who, along with husband Keven Undergaro, will be welcoming their first child via surrogate this summer, was plagued by chronic abdominal pain.
“I had severe diarrhea for a month and a half,” she said. “I did all the stool tests, they came back negative, nothing was bad. I went and got a CAT scan, they said, ‘You’re fine.’ But my pain kept persisting, and any time I complained about the pain, my doctor was like, ‘We’ve done all the tests.'”
Menounos went public with her frightening diagnosis back in May, during an interview with her former colleagues at NBC’s “Today.”
It took her a day to process the diagnosis.
“I remember waking up the next morning and 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 get to meet her?'” she said during the emotional interview. “And so Keven’s devastated, I’m devastated, we can’t tell anybody. I can’t tell my dad, how much more can that man take?”
(Video: YouTube)
Eventually, she chose to adopt a positive attitude.
“The more I thought about it, I was like, this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense. 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?'” she said.
“When you are met with a [potential] death sentence everything changes,” she told People.
Luckily, in spite of the tumor’s growth, the cancer was caught early enough for the mother-to-be to avoid chemotherapy or radiation. After a February surgery, Menounos was given a clean bill of health.
She now expresses her gratitude to her body daily.
“I talk to my pancreas every day,” she told People. “I talk to all of my body organs and say ‘I really love you. Thank you for handling everything.'”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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