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Maria Menounos' shocking cancer revelation is a stark warning about how diagnosis can be tricky

The tumor was 'two centimeters (0.79 inches), and by the time they had found it was almost four centimeters (1.5 inches),' Maria Menounos said

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Maria Menounos has revealed the complicated side of medical diagnoses where a tiny mistake can have devastating ramifications. The journalist reportedly shared her story on Dear Media's ‘Not Skinny But Not Fat’ podcast in which she claimed that she underwent her first scan in November 2022 but everything seemed fine.

However, her January full-body MRI disclosed that she had stage-two pancreatic cancer. Menounos said, as reported by the Daily Mail, “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.’ 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.”

‘It's a really complicated process’

The 45-year-old media personality went on to explain, “What I've learned since is... different scans have the ability to see different things better. For this, an MRI was what's really going to see it, for other things CAT scans are better, for other 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 noted.

What led Maria Menounos to have an MRI?

On the podcast, Menounos also disclosed that she had been struggling with chronic abdominal pain. The former E! News presenter claimed, “I had severe diarrhea for a month and a half. 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.’”

However, once the MRI was done, the picture was clear to her. In May, Menounos, who will soon welcome her first child via surrogacy with her husband Keven Undergaro, told TODAY, “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?’ 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?”

She added, “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?’”