During the complex surgery, which lasted about seven hours, Dr. Black was able to remove 99.9 percent of the tumour, which was benign. “He said there’s a six to seven percent chance that we’ll see it come back,” she says. “But I’ll take those odds any day.”
Now back at home after a six-day hospital stay, Menounos is healing and spending time with her mother, Litsa, whose latest MRI shows that her cancer is stable. “I don’t have my balance fully yet but as long as I’m holding on to Keven, I’m sturdy and fine,” Menounos says. “My face is still numb. 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, who has worked for E!, Extra and Access Hollywood, appeared on Dancing with the Stars and wrestled for the WWE, sees the experience as a “blessing” that brought her family closer and led her to re-evaluate her life. “We’re caretakers as women and we put ourselves last,” she says. “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.”
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.