Maria Menounos Talks Pancreatic Cancer and Health Advocacy

In early 2023, Maria Menounos suspected something was going on with her health. She’d been dealing with unexplained bloating for over a year. “I was taking pictures and monitoring it. I got an endoscopy and a colonoscopy; I did everything and they kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s nothing there,'” Menounos says in an interview discussing her partnership with Mastercard’s Stand Up to Cancer Campaign.

Then, her bloating turned into severe abdominal pain. During a travel day back to LA, Menounos recalls wanting to scream out loud. “I was in excruciating pain and just wanted to jump out of the plane,” she tells PS. Still, upon returning home, doctors found nothing, ruling out Celiac disease and other food intolerances.

Finally, a friend recommended Menounos get a full-body scan outside her standard doctor’s office, and it detected a large mass on her pancreas. “That was not seen a month and a half or two months before that, when I had been scanned. They missed it, unfortunately,” she tells PS. In January 2023, Menounos was officially diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

“How can I finally have a baby on the way and now I’m not even going to meet her? It was just unreal to me.”

“Getting that diagnosis was terrifying,” she says, telling PS that she remembers gutturally crying upon hearing the news. At the time, her surrogate was pregnant with her now 1-year-old, Athena, and Menounos feared that she might not live to see her daughter. “How can I finally have a baby on the way and now I’m not even going to meet her? It was just unreal to me,” she recalls thinking.

But this wasn’t her first health scare. Menounos had been diagnosed with a benign (non-cancerous) brain tumor in 2017 and had it removed. Her mother had been diagnosed with glioblastoma (stage four brain cancer) the year prior and died in 2021. A key part of getting through it all, Menounos says, was perspective. “You have to know that you can’t be committed to any diagnosis. Don’t be committed to any kind of outcome — you have to leave all options on the table,” she tells PS.

With her pancreatic cancer diagnosis specifically, this was very important, Menounos says. “The first thing I said to the radiologist, Shawn, when he went white as a ghost and saw this tumor on my pancreas was, ‘So I’m a goner, right?'” But she knew that kind of thinking wouldn’t keep her strong. Menounos would go on to have surgery in February to remove the mass, part of her pancreas, her spleen, 17 lymph nodes, and a fibroid, per PEOPLE.

The mantra that carried her through it is one that she learned from her “Heal Squad” podcast. “I’m going to choose wonder over worry,” Menounos would repeat to herself throughout the journey.

“I said, ‘I wonder what it’s going to be like when the doctor calls me with good news’ — and it happened. ‘I wonder what it’s going to be like when I get through this surgery and get to the other side’ — and it happened. ‘I wonder what it’s going to be like to welcome a healthy, happy, beautiful daughter’ — and it happened.” She likens this manifestation process to “building a muscle” where you’re training your brain to think differently.

In doing so, “The energy field was cleaner than just terror, and guttural crying,” Menounos says. Now cancer-free, Menounos is focused on maintaining her health and advocating for others.

Her wellness non-negotiables include getting a daily dose of sun, hitting the sauna, and doing some form of movement — whether it’s Pilates or a quick hike. “I’m trying to do all the things that I can so that I can heal completely and live a long, healthy life for my baby and for myself.”

And in being unfiltered and honest about her own health experiences, she hopes that others are encouraged to “get the outside scan” or do whatever it is to get the health outcomes they serves. “I’ve been gaslit at the doctors too, unfortunately, and so you have to keep fighting,” she tells PS. “You have to be the CEO of your own health.”

Alexis Jones is the senior health and fitness editor at PS. Her passions and areas of expertise include women’s health and fitness, mental health, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women’s Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.