Maria Menounos gets emotional recalling cancer diagnosis with 1st child on the way

Former E! News correspondent Maria Menounos started getting emotional on TODAY when she spoke about receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis with a baby on the way.

Menounos, who is expecting her first child via surrogacy with husband Keven Undergaro this summer, said "all that kept flashing through my head was my baby."

"How could God finally bless me with a baby after 10 years, and now I’m not going to get to meet her," Menounos recalled thinking the morning after she had a biopsy performed.

Menounos, 44, said she first started experiencing "excruciating pain" when she was on a flight last fall. She said she had eaten farro salad and thought she may have become gluten intolerant.

"It was really, really painful and I didn't think I was going to make it through the flight," she said.

In November, she started getting the same abdominal pain, coupled with loose stools. She went to the emergency room and did stool tests and a CT scan, but she said everything came back "unremarkable."

"Anytime I complained about it thereafter was like, 'Well, we just scanned and everything was fine.' But I kept feeling over here, my upper left quadrant, this throbbing," she said. "Something was wrong."

After a friend urged her to get a full-body MRI, she had the scan scheduled in January. It was when the radiologist was reading her the results that she began to realize it was more than just pain.

"The mass kept persisting in every image, and he goes, 'You need to go to the hospital right away,'" Menounos recalled the radiologist telling her. "He's white as a ghost and he's shaking. My eyes started to well, and I just looked at him and I go, 'So I'm a goner.'"

Menounos, who has Type 1 diabetes and had a benign brain tumor removed in 2017, called her primary care doctor, and another MRI confirmed there was a mass. She said the doctor who performed the biopsy told it her would be "nothing" before the procedure.

"Even when I went in for the biopsy, the doctor was like, 'This is nothing. It's just inflammation, maybe pancreatitis,'" she said. "When when I came out he goes 'Oh, this is definitely something.'"

The morning after the biopsy, Menounos said she began "guttural crying" when she thought about her baby and how her health situation didn'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?' And so I said we have to take this step by step, and we started to calm down."

Menounos told People she was diagnosed in January after a full-body MRI showed she had a 3.9-centimeter mass on her pancreas. After it was biopsied, doctors told her it was a stage 2 neuroendocrine tumor, which usually has a better prognosis than other forms of pancreatic cancer.

Menounos had surgery to remove the tumor in February, and that her recovery was "super painful," she told People.

She revealed more details of the procedure on TODAY, including that she had the tail of her pancreas removed, plus her spleen, 17 lymph nodes and a fibroid "the size of a baby" on her uterus.

Menounos said that despite everything, she feels blessed to be able to use her story to inspire others to advocate for their health.

"I want to sound the alarms to everybody that you have to be the CEO of your health," she said. "You cannot give that over to anybody — that job is yours. You know your body, you know what's going on."

"I'm just so lucky that I'm going to be able to hold my baby in the summer," she added. "That's the best blessing of all."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com