Maria Menounos

Maria found out she was facing a personal health crisis as she cared for her mother with stage 4 brain tumors. In February 2014 Menounos started experiencing troubling symptoms. "I'd noticed that I was feeling lightheaded while on set, and was suffering from headaches," the actress tells PEOPLE in the magazine's exclusive new feature. "My speech had gotten slow and I was experiencing difficulties comprehending the teleprompter". An MRI found Menounos to have a huge-sized meningioma tumor in the brain that has grown to the size that of a golf ball. The tumour was pressing her facial nerves. Menounos scheduled an appointment with her mom's physician, the renowned Neurosurgeon Dr. Keith L. Black who scheduled the surgery on June 8, her 39th birthday. "He stated, 'I'm 98 percent sure it's a benign tumor, however, we'll only know that when we're in the hospital at the time of surgery,'" she says. Dr. Black managed to eliminate 99.9 percent of benign tumors through a surgery that took seven hours. "He advised that there's about an 8% to 7% likelihood that we'll have it occur again," she says. The odds of this are my top chance to bet. Menounos is home after a six-day stay in hospital. She is currently recuperating and spending the company of Litsa as well as her mother. Litsa's recent MRI confirms she's unaffected by cancer.