Ex-MTV VJ Rues Decision to 'Keep My Tumor'

At a CNN roundtable that aired this week, former MTV VJ Ananda Lewis nonchalantly made a shocking announcement: Her breast cancer, which she'd first revealed in 2020, has metastasized and sent her into Stage 4 of the disease, reports People. Lewis made the reveal in a discussion with CNN anchor Sara Sidner, who has Stage 3 breast cancer, and host Stephanie Elam, who the New York Times notes has been best friends with Lewis since they met at college in the '90s. Lewis, 51, said that in early 2019, when she was first diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer, she rebuffed her doctor's suggestion that she get a double mastectomy, deciding she'd "try to work it out of my body a different way."

"I decided to keep my tumor," Lewis said, noting that she felt her body was "intelligent" enough to deal with the hand she'd been dealt. Instead of getting the recommended mastectomy, Lewis threw herself into a homeopathic regimen of treatment, eating and sleeping better, exercising, taking medication, and receiving radiation. She tells the Times that after about four months, she got her cancer "down to a Stage 2"—but last year, she found out the cancer had spread. "It was the first time I ever had a conversation with death," she said during her CNN discussion. She also said she was upset with herself for not agreeing to the mastectomy.

"Looking back on that, I go, 'You know what? Maybe I should have,'" Lewis told Sidner and Elam. She also noted she wishes she hadn't been so fearful of mammograms in the past, avoiding them because she was afraid of the radiation exposure—even though "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," per the Times. Still, Lewis is now taking medication used to treat advanced cancer—Stage 4 breast cancer is incurable, but it can be treated, and women with it "are living longer and longer," one doctor says—and tells the paper she's feeling better these days. "I've turned it around really beautifully," she says. (More MTV stories.)