Maria Menounos

Maria was helping her mother with stage four brain cancer. The doctor told her that she was suffering from a serious health situation. In February 2014 Menounos started experiencing troubling symptoms. "I'd experienced lightheadedness when I was on set and had headaches" she told PEOPLE in the magazine's new exclusive feature. "My speech became disorganized. Also, I had difficulty reading the Teleprompter." Menounos had been diagnosed as having a meningioma-size brain tumor. An MRI confirmed the diagnosis. Menounos made an appointment to meet her mother's neurosurgeon Dr. Keith L. Black. They scheduled surgery to take place on June 8, Menounos 39th birthday. "He advised me, 'I'm 99 percent sure it's a benign tumor, however we'll never know until we get in there at the time of surgery,'" she says. This complex procedure took approximately seven hours. Dr. Black was capable of getting rid of 99.9 percent of the benign tumor. According to Dr. Black, there's a 6-7 percent chance that it will return. "But I'll go with those odds any time." Menounos has been admitted to hospital for six days, is back at home and spending time healing.