TV personality Maria Menounos revealed in a recent episode of her “Heal Squad” podcast how she’s embraced the difficulties that have come her way, after first asking God for fewer challenges.
Despite battling pancreatic cancer, having a brain tumor removed, and a 10-year fertility journey, Menounos has never lost her faith and learned to find the lessons in her hardships.
Menounos is not the only one who turned to faith amid cancer. A 2015 National Health Interview Survey found that 69% of cancer patients reported praying for their health compared to 45% of the general United States population.
Research also suggests that faith can have a positive effect on the life expectancy of people battling cancer. A study in The Journal of Medicine and Life suggests that people who have religious belonging can triumph over cancer with more self-confidence and hope for the future.
Tom Evans, pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, says opening up to others, including God, after receiving a cancer diagnosis can help you cope with the intense feelings you may be having.
TV personality Maria Menounos, 45, has had some “tough days” in recent years, battling cancer and a brain tumor, and she admitted that she recently told God that she didn’t want to face any more challenges.
But after all that the Greek-American journalist has been throughwhich also includes a 10-year fertility journeywe can’t help but admire how Menounos has never lost her faith and strived to find the lessons in her hardships, which so many survivors can relate to.
In a clip shared on Menounos’ Instagram, the soon-to-be mom who is expecting a baby girl via surrogate, spoke in a recent episode of her “Heal Squad” podcast about learning to see that “challenges are lessons.”
Surrogacy is a process in which eggs from a woman are fertilized with sperm in a lab to make an embryo, which is then implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother until birth.
Addressing how life is always going to throw hardship our way, Menounos told her listeners, “It’s funny, life’s going to give you the challenges you need, to see the things that you don’t see.”
She continued, “Probably about yourself … about like, life. For example, the first thing that popped into my head was, I recently was praying and I was like, ‘Hey God. I think that’s enough. I think I’m done for a little while.
“‘Like, I want to keep growing. Can we maybe have them, like, be littler lessons for a little while? Can we just maybe halt for a minute and chill? Because it’s been a lot of learning and I’m really, really, punched out.’
“And I realized that just in a quick split second, like, oh, ‘b—h needed to know she was strong.'”
Maria Menounos and husband Kevin Undergaro (@mariamenounos/Instagram)
It’s clear how much of an influence Menounos has been on her fans as one of her followers commented, “I love the coping skills that I get from Heal Squad. Maria shares real-life issues in a relatable way with digestible solutions.”
Another fan wrote, “You are such an incredibly brave, beautiful, and strong woman.”
“Beautiful words and whatever god throws our way, we will keep learning and getting stronger. Thank you for your words,” commented a third.
Maria Menounos’ Health Challenges
Last month, Maria Menounos revealed that she had battled stage two pancreatic cancer, following her 2017 brain tumor scare, her mom's passing from brain cancer, and years of struggling with fertility.
Leading up to her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, Menounos, who has hosted “Extra” and “E! News,” began suffering from major leg cramps in June 2022, a symptom which resulted in her going to the hospital, where she learned she had type 1 diabetes (something both her dad and younger brother also have).
Her diabetes diagnosis then led her to be prescribed insulin and change her diet, which left her feeling better by October.
However, in November 2022, she ended up back in the hospital with “excruciating abdominal pain” and “diarrhea.” Despite what she was experiencing, doctors told her everything was “fine” with her body, but weeks later, she began feeling as if “someone was tearing my insides out.”
A whole-body MRI and a biopsy revealed she had a stage 2 pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, a type of cancer that forms in the pancreas, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Thankfully, due to Menounos’ cancer being discovered somewhat early, she was able to get the tumor, her spleen, part of her pancreas, 17 lymph nodes, and a large fibroid removed via surgery on Feb. 16 of this year.
Additionally, her doctor and surgeon said she will not need to undergo chemotherapy or other forms of treatment.
Menounos, who must continue getting yearly scans for the next five years, said on social media that there were some “tough days,” but she was “grateful” for the good ones and being able to overcome cancer.
“God granted me a miracle. I'm going to appreciate having her in my life so much more than I would have before this journey,” she said.
Meanwhile, Menounos’ mom, Litsa Menounos, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the most common and most aggressive brain cancers, back in 2016 when she was 61 years old.
While Menounos was caring for her mother, she began noticing strange symptoms like ear pain, dizziness, and blurred vision. She told her mother's doctor, thinking she was crazy that she was having similar issues.
But following an MRI, they discovered a golf ball-sized benign (non-cancerous) tumor in Maria’s brain.
Back in 2021, in an interview with TODAY, the TV host said, “I lost my mom, we lost our dog and then losing the surrogate was a loss. Trying to have kids in the midst of that would have been a lot. And so we believe that it's God protecting us. And it's going to happen at that right time.”
Menounos had been on the hunt for a surrogate and at one point had found one she liked, but things didn’t work out.
“We had an amazing surrogate and we loved her,” she explained. “But our fertility doctor told us that it was never going to work. We tried and tried and tried and tried."
In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, Menounos explained that she and her husband, Kevin Undergaro, were trying to remain hopeful despite the long process of finding the right surrogate.
“I'm going to have to continue to go with the flow and trust that God has a plan for me. I just got to surrender to it. I've gotten pretty good at it,” she said. “That was a big thing I've learned along the way. If you believe there's a plan for you whether it's the universe or god, you have to go through the motions; you have to do things that make sense: you got to go work, you got to do all these things. It's like no matter what we do, sometimes the things that we want is just not the right time. Everything has its season and its moments.”
However, Menounos remained positive, kept her faith, and didn't give up, leading her to where she is today, expecting her daughter via a surrogate.
In an interview earlier with PEOPLE this year, Menounos said, “We are so grateful to the beautiful family helping us conceive our baby. Keven, my dad, and I are all beyond excited for this soul to come into our lives. What a blessing."
Menounos, who received help from Family Match Consulting and started IVF treatments back in 2012, told People in 2022, “I definitely didn't think it was going to take this long. It's been years. We've used different services, different people. It's just been a very frustrating process.”
IVF stands for in vitro fertilization, a process in which a woman’s eggs are retrieved from her body and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The embryo can then be implanted into the mother or a surrogate.
Turning to Faith During a Cancer Journey
For some people, like Maria Menounos, turning to faith can be a great way to keep spirits high when cancer starts taking an emotional and/or physical toll.
New York City Presbyterian Pastor Tom Evans previously spoke with SurvivorNet about the importance of finding ways to cope with the complex web of feelings you may be experiencing after a cancer diagnosis.
“It's important to reach out in a simple prayer to God, even if you've never prayed before, you don't know what to say, a heartfelt plea, 'God, help me, be with me,'” Pastor Evans told SurvivorNet. “You can reach out to God and you can reach out to people, your friends and family and say, 'I can't do this on my own. I need you.’
“It's in that willingness to be open and to receive that we can actually find something deeper that we never would've encountered without this hardship.”
For Sharonda Vincent, faith played a huge role in helping her get through her stage 2B breast cancer battle.
"I knew that if I just put my faith and trust in God, that I would be okay," Vincent previously told SurvivorNet.
She was diagnosed after finding a lump in her left breast the day before her thirtieth birthday with just over a month to go before her wedding. She initially felt like her concerns were dismissed by doctors, but follow-up tests confirmed Vincent's worries. “It was hard for me. I felt as if I was being punished,” she said.
Thankfully, chemotherapy, radiation and hormone replacement proved to be a successful treatment regimen for Vincent. Now, she wants others to be inspired by her story.
“If I had one piece of advice to give to someone who was newly diagnosed with breast cancer, that advice would be to not give up hope, to live every day as if it was their last day, to educate themselves,” she said. “I would let them know that it's OK to cry.
“It's OK to have days where they just want to be alone… But I would just push them to live a long, happy life because breast cancer it's not the end of the world.”
The Power of Prayer
Prayer can be a powerful tool following a cancer diagnosis. According to a 2015 National Health Interview Survey, 69% of cancer patients reported praying for their health compared to 45% of the general United States population.
There’s even research that suggests faith plays an important role for patients and their loved ones when deciding on a treatment path.
Researchers for a study published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology's Journal of Clinical Oncology interviewed 100 patients with advanced lung cancer, their caregivers and 257 medical oncologists. They asked the participants to rank how certain factors influenced treatment decisions.
Those factors included the cancer doctor's recommendation, faith in God, the ability of treatment to cure the disease, side effects, a family doctor's recommendation, a spouse's recommendation and their children's recommendation. And the results revealed that although all groups ranked the oncologist's recommendation as most important, patients and caregivers ranked faith in God second while physicians ranked it last.
Another study even suggests there's a link between prayer and life expectancy. Research published in The Journal of Medicine and Life suggests that “religious beliefs and religion belongings can be a real relief and can have an excellent effect on the future of the patients” and there is “a significant relationship between praying and life expectancy.”
The researchers say that "patients can overcome their illness through praying, and they can also triumph cancer through self-confidence and control it, by getting more knowledge of their disease and become more hopeful about their future.”
