Maria Menounos

In the course of caring for her mother, suffering from stage 4 brain cancer Maria discovered she was facing a health crisis on her own. In February 2014 Menounos started experiencing troubling symptoms. "I'd felt lightheaded on set and having headaches," Menounos tells PEOPLE in their exclusive cover story. My speech became difficult to understand, and I also had difficulties understanding the teleprompter. The results of an MRI revealed Menounos was suffering from a meningioma the size of a golf ball brain tumor, which was pressing into her facial nerves. Menounos made an arrangement with Dr. Keith L. Black her mother's neurosurgeon and scheduled surgery for the 8th of June. Menounos is now 39 years old. "He told me that he was 98 percent sure it's benign but it will be determined once we get in there,'" she says. After the lengthy surgery which took around seven hours the surgeon Dr. Black was able to take out 99.9 percent of the tumor. This was benign. "He told me there's an eight to seven percent possibility that it will return," she says. However, I'll take these odds any day. Returning home from six days in the hospital Menounos is healing and spending some time with her mother Litsa who's latest MRI confirms that her cancer remains well-controlled.