Maria Menounos Says Doctors Missed Cancer Diagnosis

Maria Menounos recently got very honest about her strafe with pancreatic cancer and how the situation was actually worse than it should’ve been due to doctors allegedly missing the growth. According to TMZ, Menounos appeared on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast with host Amanda Hirsch and opened up about the shocking situation.

During the interview, the former Access Hollywood correspondent revealed that doctors actually missed her tumor during her initial exam and scans. The alleged mistake wasted precious time with the diagnosis and the tumor ended up doubling in size.

“When they found the tumor in the MRI, they said, “Can we go back and get the records and look at the November scan? I bet it was there,” Menounos recalled. “And it was. At that point, it was two centimeters (0.79 inches) and by the time they had found it was almost four centimeters (1.5 inches), it had doubled in size in two months.”

According to Menounos, she is still trying to get to the bottom of how doctors missed the tumor and learning a bit about the difficulty in the process. “What I’ve learned since is… different scans have the ability to see different things better,” the former host said. “For this, an MRI was what’s really going to see it, for other things CAT scans are better, for others things an ultrasound’s better. It’s a really complicated process…So the radiologist went back and he was able to see it and do an addendum and say, ‘Yes, now with the knowledge it was there, we’re able to see it is there.’”

Before her diagnosis, Menounos was celebrating the news that she was expecting her first child with her husband Keven Undergaro via surrogate. According to the interview, this was when she started having chronic abdominal pain.

“I had severe diarrhea for a month and a half. I did all the stool tests, they came back negative, nothing was bad. I went and got a CAT scan, they said, ‘You’re fine,’” she added. “But my pain kept persisting, and any time I complained about the pain, my doctor was like, ‘We’ve done all the tests.’”

The good news is that this was still early enough to have it removed and avoid treatments with chemotherapy and radiation. “When you are met with a [potential] death sentence everything changes,” Menounos told PEOPLE after the news broke. Luck is with her if anything.