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The former MTV V.J. Ananda Lewis said in a CNN round-table discussion that was posted online on Tuesday that her breast cancer, which she first learned she had in 2019, metastasized last year and had reached Stage 4.
In a phone interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Lewis, 51, said that she had since resumed treatment and was feeling much better. “I’ve turned it around really beautifully,” she said.
Lewis first became recognizable in the 1990s as a host of “Teen Summit,” a long-running weekly live show on BET that aimed to speak to Black teenagers about current issues (Lewis interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was then the first lady, on the program in 1996). She went on to host “Hot Zone,” an MTV show in which she interviewed stars and gave style advice. The Times, in a 1999 profile, described her as one of MTV’s most popular stars and “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.”
Stage 4 breast cancer means that the cancer cells have spread beyond the breast, often traveling to the bones, the lungs and the liver. It can be treated with tools like chemotherapy and hormone therapy, but it is considered incurable. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States and a leading cause of death from cancer among women globally.
In the round-table — with the CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam, Lewis’s best friend since they met at Howard University in the 1990s, and the CNN anchor Sara Sidner, who had a double mastectomy this year after learning that she had Stage 3 breast cancer — Lewis said that she had decided not to get a double mastectomy despite her doctors’ recommendation in early 2019, when she first discovered the lump and learned she had Stage 3 breast cancer.
She sought conventional care after receiving the initial diagnosis, speaking to “the right and best oncologists, the breast surgeons,” she said on Wednesday. As she told Elam, “I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.”
Instead of getting the double mastectomy, she said, she opted for more conservative treatment that included chemotherapy as well as other forms of care, including changes to her diet, sleep and exercise habits. After 16 weeks, her cancer “was down to a Stage 2,” she said on Wednesday.
Lewis first announced that she had breast cancer in an Instagram post in 2020. In a lengthy video, she implored women to get regular mammograms and not to make the same mistake she had by refusing mammograms out of fear of radiation exposure. She said that the amount of radiation she had been exposed to since discovering the tumor and seeking treatment was vastly more than what she would have experienced with regular mammograms.
“I wish I could go back,” she said in the video, tearing up, emphasizing that early detection could be lifesaving. “It’s important for me to admit where I went wrong with this,” she said. She stressed the significance of early detection again on Wednesday.
“My plan at first was to get out excessive toxins in my body,” she said in the CNN round-table. “I felt like my body is intelligent. I know that to be true. Our bodies are brilliantly made. Looking back on that, I go: ‘You know what? Maybe I should have’” had the mastectomy. “But I didn’t have good options. They wanted to take both. They wanted to do all these big things that I was not ready for.”
When she learned last year that her cancer had worsened, “it was the first time I ever had a conversation with death because I felt like, This is how it is,” Lewis told Elam.
“I don’t get afraid of things,” she added. “I was just like, ‘Fudge, man, I really thought I had this.’ I was frustrated. I was a little angry at myself.”
Dr. Neil Iyengar, a breast medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said that “there is definitely a place for lifestyle interventions” in cancer treatment, “but not by itself.”
“As an oncologist, I am seeing every year just more and more misinformation, and I’m spending more and more time fighting misinformation,” he said. “And sadly we don’t always win.”
Stage 3 breast cancer is treatable: Over 70 percent of women with the condition will survive five years or more after they are diagnosed, according to Cancer Research U.K., an independent charity. Most women with Stage 3 breast cancer are treated first with chemotherapy. The hope is that drugs can shrink a tumor to the point where it can be surgically removed, avoiding the need for a mastectomy. If the tumor is not reduced significantly enough, however, doctors may recommend a mastectomy. Radiation therapy and sometimes additional chemotherapy are also given after surgery. Some women also receive hormone therapy.
While Stage 4 breast cancer is not curable, women with the condition “are living longer and longer,” Dr. Iyengar said. Still, just over 25 percent of women will survive for five or more years after the diagnosis, according to Cancer Research U.K.
Patients with advanced breast cancer can have a range of symptoms depending on where the cancer has spread. They can experience bone and lung pain, shortness of breath and a chronic cough, as well as headaches, nausea, a sensation of numbness in the face and altered vision, speech or balance.
Lewis said on Wednesday that since she learned that her cancer had reached Stage 4, she had resumed treatment near her home in California.
She has not undergone a mastectomy, she said, and surgery and chemotherapy are no longer recommended for her at this stage. With guidance from her oncologist, she is taking medication used to treat advanced cancer.
“Those medications are working beautifully for me in combination with the other things I’m doing that help support my body,” she said. “I’m really thriving right now.”
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