Ananda Lewis, who endeared herself to legions of fans as an MTV VJ and a talk show host in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is opening up about her experience with Stage 4 breast cancer.
The television personality spoke at length about her diagnosis in a roundtable discussion with CNN’s Stephanie Elam and CNN anchor Sara Sidner, the latter of whom revealed earlier this year that she’d been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer and opted to have a double mastectomy.
During the chat, Lewis revealed that her cancer had metastasized after she’d gone against her doctors’ recommendation that she undergo her own double mastectomy following her Stage 3 cancer diagnosis more than five years ago.
“I was ready to call you and cuss you out,” Sidner told Lewis.
“They wanted to take both [breasts]. They wanted to do all of these big things that I was not ready for,” Lewis explained.
After opting to forgo the mastectomy, Lewis said, she made drastic changes to her diet and sleep routine to “get out excessive toxins in my body.”
“I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way,” she explained. “Looking back on that, I go, ‘You know what? Maybe I should have [had the double mastectomy].’”
Watch Ananda Lewis’ roundtable with CNN’s Stephanie Elam and Sara Sidner below.
“My lymph system really flared up. It was the first time I ever had a conversation with death, because I felt like, ‘This is how it ends,’” Lewis said. “I was frustrated. I was a little angry at myself, and I said, ‘Man, listen. I know you’re coming for me at some point. But I don’t want it to be now. And if you could just wait, I promise when you do come, I’m gonna make it fun for you.’”
“I literally had that conversation lying in my bed. I couldn’t get out of bed for, like, eight weeks,” she explained.
Lewis ― who shares a 13-year-old son, Langston, with husband Harry Smith ― first publicly acknowledged her Stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis in an emotional video posted to Instagram in October 2020.
“I have been fighting to get cancer out of my body for almost two years,” she said at the time. “For a really long time, I have refused mammograms, and that was a mistake.”
She reiterated the importance of mammograms in the caption of the post, writing: “This is tough for me, but if just ONE woman decides to get her mammogram after watching this, what I’m going through will be worth it.”
During her CNN chat, Lewis notably did not mention her prognosis. She did, however, address an “inability to be comfortable with doctors” that she believes is particularly prevalent among Black women.
“We have a rightful distrust of the medical industry that we do need to get over, but we are not going to negate that it came from somewhere,” she said.