MTV VJ Ananda Lewis chronicles Stage 4 breast cancer journey

Fomer MTV VJ Ananda Lewis has been living with breast cancer for nearly six years and has taken holistic and traditional approaches to treating the disease, Some of her tumors, she says, are undetectable now.

“If you extended your life, you won,” Lewis said this week in a roundtable conversation with CNN’s Stephanie Elam, who is one of her best friends, and fellow breast cancer survivor Sara Sidner, also a CNN journalist. “Nobody gets out of here alive. That is just going to happen. Your ability and your responsibility is how you’re going to thrive. My quality of life is very important to me. … I know myself, I want to want to be here. So I had to do it a certain way for me.”

The 51-year-old, who rose to fame on BET’s “Teen Summit” and hosted “The Ananda Lewis Show” in the early aughts, found a lump in her breast in January 2019. She said it was probably “growing for a good while,” and she initially vigilantly pursued alternative treatments that helped keep the disease at bay. But ultimately she “got lazy,” she said, and ran out of money, resulting in a progression to Stage 4 last year.

“When you talk about our women, Black women, being the most susceptible for dying from this, there are a lot of things tied up in those two things that make that statistic make a little sense,” Lewis said.

“Our inability to be comfortable with doctors goes way back. We have a rightful distrust of the medical industry that we need to get over, but we are not going to negate that it came from somewhere and that it’s real.”

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States except for skin cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. It accounts for about 1 in 3 new female cancers each year, and Black women are disproportionately affected by the disease. The median age at diagnosis is slightly younger for Black women (60) compared to white women (64), and Black women are more likely to die from breast cancer than any other race or ethnic group.

Upon learning about the tumor, Lewis said her cancer had progressed to the point where her doctors — whom she described as “traditional oncologists” — recommended that she have a double mastectomy. Lewis opted to try alternative therapies even though her friends, family and her sister, who is a physician and cancer survivor, gave her grief about it.

“I know people that [surgery and aggressive treatments] worked for. But this journey is very personal and you have to do what works for you and only you,” Lewis said. “My body did this, there’s something to understand there.”

Lewis said she wanted to “figure it out” on her own and reduce the environmental toxins, emotional stress and “all the whys of cancer” that contribute to the onset of the disease. “If we don’t start addressing those, the other stuff is a half-measure to me, which is why I didn’t do it,” she said of avoiding surgery, chemotherapy and other conventional breast cancer treatments.

At first, her plan was to get the “excessive toxins” out of herself because she believes bodies are “intelligent” and “brilliantly made and we mess them up.” She decided to “keep” her tumor and work it out of her body a different way, including detoxing, completely changing her diet and working on her “emotional landscapes.”

She meticulously took notes about what she ate, how she felt and even how she breathed. That resulted in “a slow-it-down period” that she thought was very effective. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and none of her resources were accessible anymore.

Meanwhile, the tumor kept growing.

Lewis relocated to Arizona and integrated conventional and natural approaches to treat the disease. She underwent insulin-potentiated chemotherapy, detoxed and did more alternative treatments that brought the cancer down to Stage 2 in 2021. But, she said, she “ran out of money” and insurance did not cover her holistic approach.

When she couldn’t keep up with the regimen prescribed to her, she said, “I just started letting my life be normal again, and this takes everything, and I wanted something back,” she said. “Cancer has a funny way of just continuing to grow.”

By October 2023, her scans showed that the cancer had metastasized up her spine, through her hips, into her lymph nodes and “almost everywhere but my brain.”

“It was the worst I’d ever been,” she said, adding that after getting a bone scan, she felt the worst pain she ever had. It also was the first time she ever “had a conversation with death,” feeling frustrated and a little angry at herself.

Through tears, Lewis told Elam and Sidner that she fractured her hip because of the bone issues she was experiencing and couldn’t get out of bed for eight weeks. When she got her insurance back, she jumped back into treatment and became eligible for new types of medicine.

Lewis said she has kept up “the integrative side” of her treatment approach, which she believes helps reduce the side effects of some of the drugs and has shrunk her tumors. Some of them are now undetectable.

For Sidner, it was Stage 3 breast cancer, which she discovered last year at age 51. She took a wholly different approach than Lewis did: She was determined to “cut it out, chemo it out, fight it out, burn [it] in hell,” wanting an immediate response. Although her cancer was in one breast, she had a double mastectomy.

“What I suddenly learned — a very hard lesson for Sara Sidner — was that it wasn’t going to be immediate and I had to deal with that. And I was pissed,” she said.

Both women expressed how important it is that women do self-exams, get to know their bodies and advocate for themselves.

Elam, who called Lewis and Sidner her sisters and “chosen family,” delved deep into both women’s experiences in hopes that it would help others.

“We are there for each other in the good and the bad. So when they both began their breast cancer journeys, I didn’t know how best to support them and I also realized I had no idea what modern cancer treatment looks like,” Elam wrote on Instagram.

The TV journalist said she was grateful for their willingness to speak with her and to “fully open up for the world.”

“If we can get just one woman to get their mammogram because of this conversation, that’s success. I want everyone to live long, healthy lives,” she wrote.

Lewis registered her response in the post’s comments section.

“Whew chile! The ride of [sic] die is REAL! It was incredible to have this conversation with you @stephelamtv and @sarasidnertv Hoping for the best outcomes for EVERYONE pushing through life with cancer Love you!”