Maria Menounos

Maria was helping her mother with Stage 4 cancer of the brain. The doctor told her that she was suffering from a serious health situation. In February 2014 Menounos started experiencing troubling symptoms. In an exclusive story in PEOPLE Menounos, she reveals she was suffering from headaches and lightheadedness while on set. My speech was becoming slurred, and I had difficulty comprehending the teleprompter. A MRI revealed Menounos to be suffering from a massive meningioma brain tumor that had grown up to the size of a golf ball. It was pressing on her facial nerves. Menounos scheduled an appointment to meet her mother's neurosurgeon Dr. Keith L. Black. The surgeon scheduled the surgery on June 8 for Menounos' 39th birthday. "He said, 'I'm 98 percent sure it's a benign tumor, however we'll never know until we get in there at the time of surgery,'" she says. The complex procedure, that took about seven hours the surgeon Dr. Black was able to take out 99.9 percent of the tumor, which was benign. According Dr. Black, there is a 6-7 percent chance that the cancer will come back. "But I'll take those odds anytime." Menounos, who was admitted to hospital for 6 days, has returned to home, and spending recovering.