Maria Menounos Announces She's Battling A Brain Tumor

E! News host Maria Menounos has been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. The news comes at the same time Menounos is caring for her mom, Litsa Menounos, who is battling stage 4 brain cancer.

According to People, Menounos started noticing something was off with her health in February. "I’d been getting lightheaded on set and having headaches,” she told the magazine. “My speech had gotten slurred and I was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.” When she was diagnosed, she admitted that she didn't cry. "I actually laughed,” she said. “It’s so surreal and crazy and unbelievable that my mom has a brain tumor—and now I have one too?”

Menounos underwent a seven-hours surgery on June 8 — her 39th birthday — to remove the mass and said the surgeon, who also operated on her mom, was able to remove 99.9% of the tumor. “He said there’s a six to seven percent chance that we’ll see it come back,” Menounos said. “But I’ll take those odds any day.” (Menounos' mom's cancer is also in "stable" condition.)

Right now, she said that she's still finding her balance, finding support both literally and figuratively from her fiancé Keven Undergaro. “My face is still numb," she told People. "This is something that takes at least a month of healing, but I’m getting stronger and stronger every day and I’ll be back to normal very soon.”

Menounos also announced that after three years, she would be leaving E! News. In a statement, she wrote that she is "grateful for the past three years at E!. I had such an amazing time co-hosting with Jason Kennedy and working everyday with the wonderful roster of talent on the show including producers, staff and crew. It was such a special, good-hearted group and one I'll always consider family."

She gave a special thank you to all the E! News producers who supported through the years, "especially during the these tough times. I will truly miss everyone and looking forward to this next chapter in my life."

That next step may be helping other women understand the symptoms of something more serious. Something Menounos has done before, writing a piece for XOJane in 2014 that talked about how an unhealthy diet and exhaustion almost killed her.

In her interview with People, Menounos said, “We’re caretakers as women and we put ourselves last. I tell people all the time if your car is making a weird noise, you take it to the mechanic. How come when our body is making weird noises, we ignore it? I’m so lucky that I went to the doctor and raised the alarm.”