Maria Menounos is expressing her gratitude for life after overcoming a number of challenging times during the past few years.
The 45-year-old television personality previously revealed that she had been diagnosed with stage 2 pancreatic cancer in January and underwent a successful surgery the following month. At the time of her diagnosis, Menounos and her husband, Keven Undergaro, were expecting their first child, daughter Athena, via surrogate.
On Thursday, the Massachusetts native took to Instagram to reflect on her health journey and the joy of becoming a first-time mother.
"Hi friends! Motherhood is going great. Athena is an Angel. She’s currently asleep on me as we get some morning light. I’m so in love it’s crazy," Menounos wrote in the caption of a photo that showed her beaming while clad in a T-shirt emblazoned with the wording ‘Mother’ and holding her 6-week-old daughter.
She continued, "Thank you to all of you for the love. I look back at the last 6 years-it’s been kinda crazy. Mom gets a brain tumor, then me, two brain surgeries later, then both my parents are hospitalized with covid, then I lost my mom, then I got diagnosed with type one diabetes, then a Neuro endocrine tumor on my pancreas…some other crazy stuff in between too."
MARIA MENOUNOS WAS 'F---ING GUTTED OVER CANCER DIAGNOSIS AFTER DOCTORS INITIALLY MISSED TUMOR
"Kev says I maybe roll to (sic) well with the punches and I should sit back and acknowledge it all more -maybe at some point I will dig in deeper," Menounos added.
"Right now just that list makes me so grateful to be alive and to have thrived. To be here to enjoy this beautiful little girl. Thank you god! Thank you st Nectarios and Panagia. I pray all of it is behind us and only great days ahead!"
In May, Menounos went public with her cancer diagnosis and said that she had a successful operation to remove the 3.9 cm tumor along with part of her pancreas, her spleen, a large fibroid and 17 lymph nodes.
Last month, Menounos revealed that doctors originally missed a tumor during a scan, which led it to double in size before she was diagnosed.
During an appearance on the "Not Skinny But Not Fat," the TV host recalled receiving a full-body MRI in January, which led to her cancer diagnosis.
"When they found the tumor in the MRI, I said, ‘Can we go back and get the records and look at the November scan? I bet it was there’" she told host Amanda Hirsch. "And it was. At that point, it was two centimeters, and by the time they had found it, it was almost four centimeters. It had doubled in size in two months."
Menounos remembered the fear and devastation she felt upon receiving her diagnosis before the birth of her first child. The Daytime Emmy Award winner had struggled with infertility for 10 years, undergoing three rounds of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) before she and Undergaro decided to have a child via surrogacy.
"I was just f---ing gutted," she said of receiving the diagnosis before Athena's birth. "I was just guttural crying, and I was like, 'I can't believe God just blessed me with a baby, I'm going to have a baby.'"
She continued, "We were two months along, and I'm like, 'I can't believe I'm finally going to have a baby, and I'm not going to get to meet her.'"
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Menounos said she's "still getting to the bottom" of how the tumor could have been missed in her first scan.
"What I've learned since is ... different scans have the ability to see different things better," Menounos said. "For this, an MRI was what's really going to see it. For other things, CAT scans are better, for other things an ultrasound's better. It's a really complicated process."
She continued, "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.'"
Last summer, Menounos was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which runs in her family. In 2017, she had surgery to remove a golf ball-size benign tumor on her brain.
Despite all her serious health challenges, Menounos told People magazine that she felt "so grateful and so lucky" to have been blessed with Athena.
"God granted me a miracle," she said. "I'm going to appreciate having her in my life so much more than I would have before this journey."
