Maria Menounos revealed that it was music from Sylvester Stallone's famed "Rocky" film that help her get through brain surgery and deal with some of the most harrowing moments in her life.
"Going into surgery, I was playing ‘Rocky’ music as my theme song," the TV personality told Anthony Scaramucci and his wife, Deidre, for their RADIO.COM podcast, which was being recorded from Scaramucci's annual SALT conference in Vegas. "Rocky's quote gets me through so much: 'It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward,'" Menounous revealed she would say to herself through her struggles.
Menounos has been through quite a roller coaster of trauma, between being diagnosed with a brain tumor and undergoing surgery, and coping with her mother’s own brain cancer diagnosis and treatments. In an exclusive interview on RADIO.COM's podcast, “Mooch and the Mrs.," Menounos opened up about how her friend, Sylvester Stallone, helped her to cope.
"He’s a dear friend, and then when I came out of surgery, that was the first thing I said. I was quoting ‘Rocky,’" Menounos said of her 2017 procedure. "When I came out, I could barely speak, and I started quoting it."
Menounous said she later told Stallone, "If you didn't know how much your words meant to me before, it's the first thing I uttered when I woke up from massive brain surgery."
Menounos said that a quote Scaramucci once told her about fear -- "Everything you want is on the other side of fear" -- also has stuck with her.
On top of coping with her own diagnoses, had her mother's illness to think about, too. After various treatment methods left her mom weakened and ill, Menounos got her involved in alternative therapies. The therapies had their side effects, though, and when Menounos went under the knife to get her own brain tumor taken care of, her mother admitted some time later that she really didn't remember it much.
"Between the cognitive deficits, the radiation, inflammation, she doesn’t remember anything," she said. However, that's really not such a bad thing. "To me, that was another silver lining because she didn’t have to feel that. To someone who has cancer, the last thing they need is stress," she said.
Despite the gravity of her struggles, Menounos has been able to gain a new sense of hope and understanding. "My life had to change, and it has, drastically. Anybody else would be kind of freaking out ... and I'm really loving the moments of uncomfortableness," she said. "I feel like if I'm gonna go to the next dimension, this is kind of that place where I'm really working on [the] next level."
To listen to "Mooch and the Mrs.," download the RADIO.COM app now.