This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dorney. Hi, everybody, welcome to the Let's Be Clear Podcast. I'm Anna Luis and I'm your guest host for this episode. I'm so honored to have been invited to come help continue the beautiful legacy that Shannon Doherty created. Looking forward to talking to y'all. So some of you may or may not remember me from being on your television almost every day in the nineties as a VJ on MTV in the what I call the Golden Era of MTV, when we actually played music videos. In the mid to late nineties, when me, Carson Daily, Bill Bellamy, Matt Penfields and others launched the Times Square Studios in New York City and had an amazing time with you for years. Maybe you remember me as far back as teen Summit on BT, which was actually my first big TV hosting gig. Some of you might know me from headlines that happened this past October about my cancer journey. A lot of people said I was dying after I shared that I hit stage four. Oh, that sounded like a prize and it's not. But you'll know what I mean. And maybe you have no clue who I am, which is great because then we get to kind of start fresh right here. In all my years of doing TV, I never had the pleasure of meeting Shannon in person. I was a fan of her work like you guys all are and were, and then I dove into following her as she shared her cancer journey that she did so bravely right up until the end. I was inspired by her this is how it is, you know, attitude, and how she faced this monster head on. I hope to borrow from some of her strength as I chat with you guys today. And maybe we should call this episode Let's be clear being real about cancer, because I'm basically going to share my story with you as real as possible and for those of you who've been through it, like I'm in the middle of it right now. Cancer fucking sucks. It just does period, no matter how you choose to treat it, it sucks. This is the January February two thousand and five edition of Essence magazine, and in it there's an article pretty much detailing my cancer journey. I want to give a huge thank you to Victoria ul Morogi for spearheading this article and kind of guiding me through the whole process as we wrote it together. I actually told her the story and you know, it came out of that. So you can check out the full article right now on Essence dot com. It just came out earlier this month, so should still be there or you can go get a hard because there's some other big articles in there. But basically it covers how things happened, what I chose to do and not do for treatment. But the real bottom line for me was about reminding women that prevention is the cure. There are so many things you can do to avoid your body making cancer to begin with, and had I known those things, I believe I never would have ended up here, But here I am. I'm also grateful I got to clarify some things in this article that people clearly misunderstood, didn't understand at all, or decided to take completely out of context from the interview I did on scene in with my bestie Stephanie Elam and our friend Sarah Signer, who is also fighting at stage three breast cancer. I am someone who has always prided myself on being honest, being upfront, being able to talk about difficult things, and I've been doing that since way back at Team Summit. So when we sat down to talk on the CNN interview, we did this roundtable that was really fun. I was just honest and my personalities. Sometimes I say crazy stuff. I don't know if you all remember that from CD, but I said something like, oh, I kept my tumor and I did it, or said it kind of tongue in cheek. You gotta find ways to laugh about this or you will lose your mind and just be crying all the time. But that became the headline. She kept her tumor and now she's stage four, And as many of you probably already know, it's just not that simple. I know more than a few women who did everything they were told to do. They got the tumors cut out, they got the double mess deck to me, they did the full chemo and radiation and still died, because cancer freaking sucks no matter how you choose to treat it. I didn't pay much attention to the comments under those headlines from the other outlets that they took, you know, from CNN's headlines, based on the things I said there. But I definitely got to hear about it from everybody who reached out to me for the entire month. One of the comments that stood out to me, because it was said repeatedly apparently, was that that was so stupid of her. Why didn't she just listen to the doctors? And in my mind, the question became which doctors? Which doctors did you want me to listen to? The original ecologist who was the one who told me I had to do the double mastectomy and the full chemo and all the standard of care stuff, or the subsequent oncologists who were integrative oncologists and did things just a little different way, who think outside of the box when it comes to cancer treatment, who tested me first to get a breakdown of what chemos were going to work on the cancer in my body and wish ones weren't. Because guess what I found out, almost a year after not doing what I was told to do by the original oncologists, the chemo that they were going to use on me, there was not gonna work to kill the cancer in my body. It was third from the bottom. In fact, there were about twenty other chemotherapies that would do way better in my body than that one would have. And then it started to make sense, I have really listened to the doctors this whole time, but also, and more importantly to me, followed my gut and my intuition about what is good and right for me, and I had this vision sitting in that original oncologist's office of myself dead. I've had many more of those visions, more frequently recently as things you know, are continuing to as I try to get them back on track. Let me say like that, But this original one was a clear no from whatever source right for me. And obviously whatever you believe is up to you, and I respect it. For me, it's God for me, it's my angels and guides wherever it came from. It was very clear, and I said, okay, that was not going to work. But the bottom line for me was, after hearing those comments, I had never one time heard anybody say about a woman who did do the conventional route and didn't survive it, Well, that was stupid. You shouldn't shouldn't have listened to those doctors because we're so trained to believe that there's only one way to handle this, that is, except to ble, and that just has not been true from me or for me from the beginning. There's this weird selective and conditional compassion and understanding. That's really disgusting, and I'm hoping the more that I talk about it, the more light gets shed on the lack of fairness of even thinking like that, the faster it goes away. I think it's just based on I don't know, ignorance, and fortunately ignorance can be cured, stupidity cannot be. But that's another conversation. The message that has been important for me to bring to other women from the very beginning when I decided to share this, which was actually about a year and a half after my diagnosis. I was diagnosed in January of twenty nineteen, and I shared it publicly in October of twenty twenty. My point then was to remind women that your best shot at being able to survive this is taking advantage of early detection, getting your mammograms when you're supposed to and listen. I am still not a fan of mammograms, but there are other options, like the QT imaging scan that's now available, or the three D ultrasound that they will send you to when your mammogram comes back funny anyway, And the problem is insurance may or may not cover those You may or may not have the finances whatever, you have access to take advantage of early detection. Right. That was number one for me, my number one mistake. I didn't do that. I shared from the very beginning that that was a big mistake. We have to be able to say when we're wrong so other people can learn from our mistakes and do better. But for me, that's where my mistake ended. I do not believe I made it incorrect decision to forego that initial standard of care treatment. Even as I find myself at stage four today, I say that my full chest, I know in my heart I did the right thing for me. Based on everything I've learned since, especially based on the dear friends that I've met on this journey, some of whom I've lost since, who did the other standard of care way of doing it, I've found that there's almost no difference in the outcome from what I've seen. This is not scientific, this is my experience. When you look at stage three and four, the upper stages of cancer and how far it's gone in your body basically determines the staging. Right when you catch it early zero one two, like my mother and sister did. Now you have a chance at that standard of care being your best option and giving you back the years you would have lost once you hit three four and it's left that original site, and it's in other places in your body, which it was for me. What I've seen and believed to be true is that the outcomes even out. Honestly, the women I've known who's diagnoses happened around the same time as me, who went the standard of care route, four out of seven of them are no longer here. And although I'm still here and worse my body is, my immune system is still undamaged enough to be eligible for other kinds of treatments, which I now get to pursue. I had one friend who did standard of care. She was so her body I should say, was so ravaged by the chemotherapy that by the time she got to the place in Arizona, which is where I met her, when I did my first round of insulm potentiated chemotherapy and all these really fancy cool things, she wasn't able to do a lot of those because her body was still suffering from so much damage. So I really think, ultimately we have to respect whatever choice someone in this position makes, and God forbid, you're ever in this position and have to make these choices. For those of you who have been, I'd be interested to hear about what your journey's been like, because for every single person I've met, it doesn't matter if the diagnosis the same. The journey is very unique and very individualized, and you have to stand behind what you choose no matter what anybody else says about it. From the beginning, I felt like I had a better shot at surviving by going this different route and integrative approach, and I wanted to focus on my quality of life as well as the length of it. What I chose to do was an approach that did less harm to my body but was still very toxic to the cancer cells and was very effective my first time going into actual treatment, which was impacted by the COVID virus because the COVID lockdowns, I should say, because I went into twenty twenty still having not done real treatment. But by the time I did decide to do something, everything in California was closed basically, So that led me to Arizona because if you remember, Arizona was like locked down for what they stayed really open, They barely masked, They were in complete rebellion, and it was good for me because it meant that I could access care. So after sixteen weeks of treatment at a center called in Vita in Scottsdale, Arizona, I had gone down from A Stage three to a aage two. And I know that if I had the financial ability to continue doing that process, I probably could have gotten completely clear. I absolutely believed that, but I didn't have the money to do that, and I couldn't afford to keep where it was. The problem for me really became that insurance will not cover the same thing they would cover on the standard of care path. This is FDA approved chemo, it's just done in a different way when you go the integrative path, and they're like, we will not touch you even though it's the same chemo they weren't covered. I mean, I have submitted just in the last year about seventy eight thousand dollars worth of reimbursibles. I probably got back about six. So what I didn't know at the beginning was you need to be rich, You need to really have access to some money to go against what your insurance is telling you to do. And somebody said to me, doctors don't even determine standard of care the insurance company does, and I believed them. I don't know if it's true, but I believed it because that's what it feels like I've experienced. Wait, this actual doctor is saying, here's what we're gonna do, and this is what we recommend in the insurance to say, Well, we don't agree, and that is not what we tell people. Her position to do. So whether it's gonna help her or not, whatever, she's gonna have to figure that out. And I don't know. I mean, there's so much I could say on that, but I just hope that it starts to change. I mean, there's so many stories I could tell you, so many angles about different cancer treatments I've done, but I don't wanna run out of my time here with you today before I go over something really important that I consider really important anyway, and that is to remind you again that prevention is the cure. There are things you can do if you're in a healthy body right now that will hopefully prevent you from getting here in the first place. My goal is to keep my story from becoming your story. So here's my list of what I wish I knew ten years ago about breast cancer. The first thing I would do differently had I known, was better sleep. Sleep matters. There are so many studies linking awful sleep to breast cancer. Awful sleep like the kind that mothers get, which was the case for me when my son was young. He's thirteen now, but when he was little, I would sleep maybe three to five hours a night if I was lucky. Because I stayed up in the middle of the night doing all the things I needed to do for myself. I considered it my knee time. I had no idea that not getting enough sleep during the right hours. I'll add that cuts down on your melatonin production severely, and melatonin is one of the hormones the body uses to prevent and fight cancer. So I want you to do your own research. Don't listen to me. Am I a scientist, No, Am I a doctor. No, I'm just a woman who's been wrestling this for six years and struggling to stay alive and doing every single thing I can do back by science, looking at the studies to be here when my son graduates from high school. That's my immediate goal right now, and that's four more years, right and then I'll set a new goalie, because I plan on making that, and then I'll make a new goal and hopefully I'm better by then than I am now, and I have another, you know, five or ten year goal in mind. Anyway, God willing right, So look up the studies yourself. That's what I recommend. There's nothing like seeing the proof for yourself. Because listen, doctors are trained in a certain way. They're amazing, wonderful people who dedicated their lives to helping us, and they only know what they know. You know, they only know what they know, and they're not allowed to talk to you about these things that are outside of their scope of work and what they can offer. So you get them in trouble when you start to press them for telling you these other treatments or go that's not what they do. You have to And this I've learned about even how I treat my friends and people I love. Stop demanding of people's things they can't do. Accept people for where they are. That's been big for me on this journey. Some people cannot show up for me the way I need them to, and some of those people may be really close to me. I can either waste my time trying to demand and expect and wait and hope and dream and pray that they're gonna change, or I can control the only thing I can control, which is me, and decide to let them be who they are and find what I might need from them elsewhere, because that makes the most sense to me. So you get to determine what makes the most sense to you. I'm just sharing what I've learned along the journey. And the next thing that I wished I knew ten years ago was how much of an impact stressful relationships can be on fueling cancer and causing cancer. I'm talking about all kinds of relationships, but ladies, you know, for us, it's really our significant other and being in a state of constant fear, panic, doubt, questioning the relationship, arguing too much or worse all keeps us in a state of chronic stress. Look up how much damage chronic stress does to your body, Lane, so you can start avoiding it, because it's one of the most simple things you can cut out of your life. And when I say cut out, I do mean like taking a scalpel. And you know, because when it comes down to it, you and being alive is more important than any relationship, and that's kind of what I had to come to in my life at the time too. I left my son's dad in September of twenty nineteen. I was diagnosed in January. That whole time things were being clarified, and I don't like to get into details about that because I love and respect my son. I love and respect his dad too, But listen, what happened happened between adults, and I get to share my story, right, I mean, you don't have to agree. The other person is never going to agree with what happened to you because it didn't happen to them, happen to you. But I preserve and protect my son's father because of my son, and so I'm never gonna go too far down that rabbit hole, which it definitely is. But I have bit my forbitten my tongue on it for all this time because I don't want to leave a legacy that my son has to deal with that isn't fair to him. And you know, ultimately it's only my side of the story. Maybe I was a nightmare too. Listen, I'm gonna owe my stuff. But the chronic stress begins to feel normal when you've lived with it so long and it is incredibly dangerous for your body. So that's the next thing I would say. I wish I knew. So let's see number three. They're not ranked in order. These are all just the things I picked up along the way. But the next thing I would say is the biggest one. Everybody says right now, what you feed your body matters. And I'm gonna tell tell you what kind of sugar fiend I was. I was eating maybe four donuts a day. Now, when you're in a chronically stressful situation. For me, food and alcohol became the go to to deal with a lot of what I was dealing with. And I'm not saying it was all about my intimate relationship. There were other stressers in my life too. There were other things that were causing me to be stressed out right. So whichever of the things I was dealing with that was causing me to stay chronic stress, what I went to to help myself was horrible sugar and alcohol. Basically, I was doing mammy juice wine, you know, red wine. It wasn't drinking hard liquor, even though I had at other periods in my life. I was doing wine. Though after I stopped breastfeeding, which I breastfed for about three years, I got my mama juice back because I, of course would never take a risk while while my son would have you know, had some kind of damage or curb potentially. But as soon as I got the green light, I was like, cooh, let's go. And that was, looking back, a horrible decision. I had no idea how much damage alcohol does to the body. We'll get to that in a sect because that's the next one I want to talk about more in depth. Right now, let me stick to the sugar, because the doughnuts were my best friend, and that one has become pretty clear to a lot of people. I think now we understand better than we did. You know seven I guess years ago and when I was in these bad habits fully and I say ten years because if I had started fixing things ten years ago, I would have avoided it completely, because I think I would have caught it before the tumor even started growing. That is debatable because I have no proof. I have no way of proving that right, but that's what I believe. There are a lot of studies getting traction right now about our diets and what we put in our mouth and fuel our bodies with being vital to the outcomes. Now we're not even just talking cancer. I mean, yeah, worst case scenario, but diabetes and a lot of these immunocompromised diseases are being attributed to bad food, and sugar intake absolutely falls into the category of bad. Now we're talking refined sugar, right, Fruit sugars are not as much on the chopping block for me, they are now because I've seen what a difference a kto diet makes to how my body feels while wrestling cancer. I say wrestling because I just don't like the word fighting. I guess it feels more like a wrestle because sometimes it's above, sometimes I'm above. We go back and forth. We dance, but that's too much of a compliment. I'm not dancing with this shit. I'm wrestling and I'd like to win. But basically, refined sugar causes what I just mentioned before with the stress inflammation, and if you're constantly eating it, your body is going to be in chronic inflammation. Refined sugar creates that the seed oils create that all of it causes inflammation, and for the sugar. The insulin spikes all day set you up for not just cancer, but the other stuff I mentioned before, diabetes and some of these immuno suppressive and what like MS. I have a friend who's dealing with MS and has been told to avoid all sugar. There's a reason for that. Your body can only handle so much inflammation. Now, cute inflammation is a logical and healthy and good response from your body. You cut yourself, you want your body to get inflamed around that cut. You want your body to send all the troops over there to help it heal. We're talking chronic inflammation where your body never gets a break. There's this constant inflamed state and your immune system gets worn out trying to put at sech. These fires in LA have been like the fire department had to go to five and six and seven different fires in one day. What the heck? That is too much to expect. That's what is happening to your body when you have these constant inflammations happening all over the place. So I would have changed my diet first, and it is one of the things I changed first when I found out by my diagnosis, because I'd already gone through this with my mom, and I saw that in her chemotherapy appointments that were giving her grape juice and Snickers bars and granola bars, and so I had started doing research way back then and knew that was a horrible choice for them to do. Some places have now come around and they're starting to make healthier choices for their cancer pations, and some haven't. And I think this is just something that is going to take a little time for people to start to change their minds. When people believe they're doing things correctly, this is true for all of us, myself included. When you believe you're doing something right and then you find out you're not, that is a shock to your system and change is difficult. I have witnessed that for myself. Change is difficult. But my diet was horrible thirteen years ago. All right. The next thing is exercise. Now. I have been back and forth on exercise my whole life. I found plans that worked. I did P ninety, Yes, I did the Beast program. I did all these different programs. But my goal was to make my body look the way I wanted it to look. What my goal needed to be about was my circulation and immune system, because when you move, your immune system moves and flushes and goes through and picks up the dirt and junk and starts to get it out and deal with it. And when you don't move, your immune system doesn't move either. Your lymphatic system is a huge part of your immune system. I think like eighty percent of your immune system is made in your lymphatic systems. Listen, don't quote me on these things. Like I said, I'm not a scientist I've been reading a lot of this stuff over the years. I picked it up along the way. Go look at it yourself, because the numbers don't matter. The facts do. And the fact is that your immune system does not have a pump. You are the pump. Your immune and lymphatic system work together. By you pumping them. What pumps your immune and your lymphatic systems working out. And I'm not saying like I can't even lift heavyweights anymore. My skeletal system has a decent amount of cancer in it and it is limited what I'm able to do right now. But when I was it wasn't even about lifting heavyweights. I hear that that's important too, But if you aren't at the place. You know you're not going to go from not working out to doing some body competition. Right, Let's be realistic and let's take baby steps because those are important. To baby steps count. If you're not doing any working out or daily movement, just start by walking. Just start by parking the furthest away from the door, if the story you're going into and getting yourself used to that movement. That's what I've had to do. I've had to reduce the amount of movement to walking. But there was a time where I wasn't moving at all. I would do these programs and fail to meet my body goal of how I wanted to look, and then I would stop, and then I would eat the donetups again and go back to the well. I mean, it's just this vicious cycle that I know I'm not alone in. I'm talking about myself, but I'm probably talking about you or someone you know and love too. And the point is you have a chance to fix it right now if you're in a healthy body right. Stagnation in the immune system is a huge problem when it comes to cancer and other things, and the way you fix that is by moving every day. If you can, I do a two mile walk every day now because that is vital to my survival. You have like a thirty five percent risk cut, right, you cut your risk, I'll say it in a better way. You cut your risk of developing cancer by like thirty five percent just by exercising and walking and moving your body. It's worth every step that you can figure out how to do. The next up is toxins. And one of the biggest ways that I have learned that toxins creep into your body. I mean, yes, what you eat toxic food, right, Yes, you're breathing toxic air. Right. We can control the food part, the air we can control a little less, but what you put on your skin. Your skin is your number one organ, and everything you put on it, from perfumes to creams and lotions that have a bunch of toxins in them, to all of that seeps into your skin. THEEWG dot org has an amazing collection of chemicals that do not belong in our body care, hair care, skin care products. Many of them are still there, but they don't belong there. But you can check them out and find out the things that you need to avoid. We're talking household cleaning products too, and for me. One of the things that I did that was probably a little radical, but I'm in a radical situation, so it calls for radical solutions. I got rid of all the polyester clothing that I had, and I especially wanted to focus on the fabric I sleep And I'd say polyester, but all fabrics made from the waste of gas and oil production is what I mean. So polyester, acrylic, nylon, all the ones that come from it. Again, there's research to be done and everything is googleable. I wanted to focus on the fabric I sleep in because you spend more time in that clothing I do anyway about you when I'm in lounge clothes most of the time. So and also because you're sweating at night, your pores are opening up. Whatever is coming off of that fabric is leeching off of it is going to absorb into your body through your skin. So when I threw away all my polyester, it ended up being like five garbage bags the clothes things I loved. There were cute things in the bag that I was like, no, I can't do it, but I would look at the label. It's like a hundred percent polyester, And then I said, I can't do it. That's what I really can't do is the toxin. So I had to get rid of that stuff. That was again a very kind of dial down. I'm going to go the furthest I can. I'm going to get rid of the most I can. So that was me being extreme. But look at the fabrics. Look at the information about how fabrics can poison your body, and how the things you put on your skin can make you more toxic, because toxins are incredibly important to reduce to avoid developing cancer. Now we'll get to the obvious ones. Reducing alcohol, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, were going to get to a little more and quitting smoking. Now. I smoked for way longer than I'd like to admit. It was one of the nastiest habits I've ever had. I smoked the entire time I was on TV, and I was so ashamed of embarrassed. I was so ashamed and embarrassed I should say of it that I hid it from everybody. Most people who knew me did not know that I smoked unless they were some of the very few people that smoke with me. And we're hiding too. We would go around corners during the beach house anyway to get it all those stories, because listen, the point is letting you know that you need to stop smoking if you're smoking and that alcohol. I know you guys have seen all the information in the last couple of months demonizing alcohol. It's true. Alcohol is a poison, and that's why it makes you feel the way it makes you feel. It's poisoning your body. And the effects you're feeling are your body dealing with poison. It's why it ruins your lover, because your liver has to detox all that poison. And you know they say one drink is all you need to poison your body. I honestly believe that alcohol was a huge fuel for me and this cancer that I'm wrestling, and that's just again my gut. I look at the things I was doing and there was a lot of wine passing my lips. With the alcohol. I stopped cold turkey. I was scared enough and it was something I could give up easily. With the smoking, I used hypnosis high and you recommend took me one time. Never touched cigarette again. I did that more than a decade before the cancer ever, you know, was an issue and was found in my body. But I wish I had done it even sooner. I wish I had gone to some kind of therapy more consistently in my life to start dealing with a lot of the trauma issues that I live with, and just you know, the kind of childhood that I had, and a lot of the things that haunt me because they add to your chronic stress. But also those were the reasons that I was reaching for all this anesthetizing in my life, And had I dealt with those issues a little sooner, I probably would have done less of that. But alcohol and cigarettes and how much of those things you can handle depends on your body. I think in all of these things that I'm talking about, it's all about your specific body. Listen. I know people who have drank I mean hard alcohol. Johnny Walker black type hard alcohol for decades. Grandfather decades of drinking, and his body was fine till he was like seventy eighty. Some bodies are heartier than others. It's just how it is. It's not fair, But most things in this life are not fair. They just were just what they are. So if you notice in your body that you can't take certain things, those are the things you need to get rid of first. But none of the stuff I was doing was worth the risks that I didn't even realize I was taking. And that's why I want you to know those things now. There are more things that I could share with you. I could talk forever about this, because I am really passionate about helping people preserve their lives given where I'm at. But my time is almost step and the bottom line is again it's my mantra, prevention is the cure. If you're in a healthy body, do the things you can do to avoid my story becoming your story. I go into more detail about my journey in the Essence article with beautiful Shakerri rich In on the cover. If you're looking for the hard copy again, Essence dot Com is where you can go online right now to read it for yourself. There's some other great articles in there too. Like I said, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm at I'm Ananda Lewis. I do more discussions about things like this, and I will be doing even more as as I can. It'll be one of the things I start digging into. So I just want to say thank you again to the Let's be clear team for having me, and I am going to and I hope you are to honor Shannon Dougherty's legacy by living our lives boldly like she lived hers. And I hope you had a good time listening to me bent on about these things today. And that's it. I'm Ananda Lewis and it's been real. I'll see you out there.

This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dorney. Hi, everybody, welcome to the Let's Be Clear Podcast. I'm Anna Luis and I'm your guest host for this episode. I'm so honored to have been invited to come help continue the beautiful legacy that Shannon Doherty created. Looking forward to talking to y'all. So some of you may or may not remember me from being on your television almost every day in the nineties as a VJ on MTV in the what I call the Golden Era of MTV, when we actually played music videos. In the mid to late nineties, when me, Carson Daily, Bill Bellamy, Matt Penfields and others launched the Times Square Studios in New York City and had an amazing time with you for years. Maybe you remember me as far back as teen Summit on BT, which was actually my first big TV hosting gig. Some of you might know me from headlines that happened this past October about my cancer journey. A lot of people said I was dying after I shared that I hit stage four. Oh, that sounded like a prize and it's not. But you'll know what I mean. And maybe you have no clue who I am, which is great because then we get to kind of start fresh right here. In all my years of doing TV, I never had the pleasure of meeting Shannon in person. I was a fan of her work like you guys all are and were, and then I dove into following her as she shared her cancer journey that she did so bravely right up until the end. I was inspired by her this is how it is, you know, attitude, and how she faced this monster head on. I hope to borrow from some of her strength as I chat with you guys today. And maybe we should call this episode Let's be clear being real about cancer, because I'm basically going to share my story with you as real as possible and for those of you who've been through it, like I'm in the middle of it right now. Cancer fucking sucks. It just does period, no matter how you choose to treat it, it sucks. This is the January February two thousand and five edition of Essence magazine, and in it there's an article pretty much detailing my cancer journey. I want to give a huge thank you to Victoria ul Morogi for spearheading this article and kind of guiding me through the whole process as we wrote it together. I actually told her the story and you know, it came out of that. So you can check out the full article right now on Essence dot com. It just came out earlier this month, so should still be there or you can go get a hard because there's some other big articles in there. But basically it covers how things happened, what I chose to do and not do for treatment. But the real bottom line for me was about reminding women that prevention is the cure. There are so many things you can do to avoid your body making cancer to begin with, and had I known those things, I believe I never would have ended up here, But here I am. I'm also grateful I got to clarify some things in this article that people clearly misunderstood, didn't understand at all, or decided to take completely out of context from the interview I did on scene in with my bestie Stephanie Elam and our friend Sarah Signer, who is also fighting at stage three breast cancer. I am someone who has always prided myself on being honest, being upfront, being able to talk about difficult things, and I've been doing that since way back at Team Summit. So when we sat down to talk on the CNN interview, we did this roundtable that was really fun. I was just honest and my personalities. Sometimes I say crazy stuff. I don't know if you all remember that from CD, but I said something like, oh, I kept my tumor and I did it, or said it kind of tongue in cheek. You gotta find ways to laugh about this or you will lose your mind and just be crying all the time. But that became the headline. She kept her tumor and now she's stage four, And as many of you probably already know, it's just not that simple. I know more than a few women who did everything they were told to do. They got the tumors cut out, they got the double mess deck to me, they did the full chemo and radiation and still died, because cancer freaking sucks no matter how you choose to treat it. I didn't pay much attention to the comments under those headlines from the other outlets that they took, you know, from CNN's headlines, based on the things I said there. But I definitely got to hear about it from everybody who reached out to me for the entire month. One of the comments that stood out to me, because it was said repeatedly apparently, was that that was so stupid of her. Why didn't she just listen to the doctors? And in my mind, the question became which doctors? Which doctors did you want me to listen to? The original ecologist who was the one who told me I had to do the double mastectomy and the full chemo and all the standard of care stuff, or the subsequent oncologists who were integrative oncologists and did things just a little different way, who think outside of the box when it comes to cancer treatment, who tested me first to get a breakdown of what chemos were going to work on the cancer in my body and wish ones weren't. Because guess what I found out, almost a year after not doing what I was told to do by the original oncologists, the chemo that they were going to use on me, there was not gonna work to kill the cancer in my body. It was third from the bottom. In fact, there were about twenty other chemotherapies that would do way better in my body than that one would have. And then it started to make sense, I have really listened to the doctors this whole time, but also, and more importantly to me, followed my gut and my intuition about what is good and right for me, and I had this vision sitting in that original oncologist's office of myself dead. I've had many more of those visions, more frequently recently as things you know, are continuing to as I try to get them back on track. Let me say like that, But this original one was a clear no from whatever source right for me. And obviously whatever you believe is up to you, and I respect it. For me, it's God for me, it's my angels and guides wherever it came from. It was very clear, and I said, okay, that was not going to work. But the bottom line for me was, after hearing those comments, I had never one time heard anybody say about a woman who did do the conventional route and didn't survive it, Well, that was stupid. You shouldn't shouldn't have listened to those doctors because we're so trained to believe that there's only one way to handle this, that is, except to ble, and that just has not been true from me or for me from the beginning. There's this weird selective and conditional compassion and understanding. That's really disgusting, and I'm hoping the more that I talk about it, the more light gets shed on the lack of fairness of even thinking like that, the faster it goes away. I think it's just based on I don't know, ignorance, and fortunately ignorance can be cured, stupidity cannot be. But that's another conversation. The message that has been important for me to bring to other women from the very beginning when I decided to share this, which was actually about a year and a half after my diagnosis. I was diagnosed in January of twenty nineteen, and I shared it publicly in October of twenty twenty. My point then was to remind women that your best shot at being able to survive this is taking advantage of early detection, getting your mammograms when you're supposed to and listen. I am still not a fan of mammograms, but there are other options, like the QT imaging scan that's now available, or the three D ultrasound that they will send you to when your mammogram comes back funny anyway, And the problem is insurance may or may not cover those You may or may not have the finances whatever, you have access to take advantage of early detection. Right. That was number one for me, my number one mistake. I didn't do that. I shared from the very beginning that that was a big mistake. We have to be able to say when we're wrong so other people can learn from our mistakes and do better. But for me, that's where my mistake ended. I do not believe I made it incorrect decision to forego that initial standard of care treatment. Even as I find myself at stage four today, I say that my full chest, I know in my heart I did the right thing for me. Based on everything I've learned since, especially based on the dear friends that I've met on this journey, some of whom I've lost since, who did the other standard of care way of doing it, I've found that there's almost no difference in the outcome from what I've seen. This is not scientific, this is my experience. When you look at stage three and four, the upper stages of cancer and how far it's gone in your body basically determines the staging. Right when you catch it early zero one two, like my mother and sister did. Now you have a chance at that standard of care being your best option and giving you back the years you would have lost once you hit three four and it's left that original site, and it's in other places in your body, which it was for me. What I've seen and believed to be true is that the outcomes even out. Honestly, the women I've known who's diagnoses happened around the same time as me, who went the standard of care route, four out of seven of them are no longer here. And although I'm still here and worse my body is, my immune system is still undamaged enough to be eligible for other kinds of treatments, which I now get to pursue. I had one friend who did standard of care. She was so her body I should say, was so ravaged by the chemotherapy that by the time she got to the place in Arizona, which is where I met her, when I did my first round of insulm potentiated chemotherapy and all these really fancy cool things, she wasn't able to do a lot of those because her body was still suffering from so much damage. So I really think, ultimately we have to respect whatever choice someone in this position makes, and God forbid, you're ever in this position and have to make these choices. For those of you who have been, I'd be interested to hear about what your journey's been like, because for every single person I've met, it doesn't matter if the diagnosis the same. The journey is very unique and very individualized, and you have to stand behind what you choose no matter what anybody else says about it. From the beginning, I felt like I had a better shot at surviving by going this different route and integrative approach, and I wanted to focus on my quality of life as well as the length of it. What I chose to do was an approach that did less harm to my body but was still very toxic to the cancer cells and was very effective my first time going into actual treatment, which was impacted by the COVID virus because the COVID lockdowns, I should say, because I went into twenty twenty still having not done real treatment. But by the time I did decide to do something, everything in California was closed basically, So that led me to Arizona because if you remember, Arizona was like locked down for what they stayed really open, They barely masked, They were in complete rebellion, and it was good for me because it meant that I could access care. So after sixteen weeks of treatment at a center called in Vita in Scottsdale, Arizona, I had gone down from A Stage three to a aage two. And I know that if I had the financial ability to continue doing that process, I probably could have gotten completely clear. I absolutely believed that, but I didn't have the money to do that, and I couldn't afford to keep where it was. The problem for me really became that insurance will not cover the same thing they would cover on the standard of care path. This is FDA approved chemo, it's just done in a different way when you go the integrative path, and they're like, we will not touch you even though it's the same chemo they weren't covered. I mean, I have submitted just in the last year about seventy eight thousand dollars worth of reimbursibles. I probably got back about six. So what I didn't know at the beginning was you need to be rich, You need to really have access to some money to go against what your insurance is telling you to do. And somebody said to me, doctors don't even determine standard of care the insurance company does, and I believed them. I don't know if it's true, but I believed it because that's what it feels like I've experienced. Wait, this actual doctor is saying, here's what we're gonna do, and this is what we recommend in the insurance to say, Well, we don't agree, and that is not what we tell people. Her position to do. So whether it's gonna help her or not, whatever, she's gonna have to figure that out. And I don't know. I mean, there's so much I could say on that, but I just hope that it starts to change. I mean, there's so many stories I could tell you, so many angles about different cancer treatments I've done, but I don't wanna run out of my time here with you today before I go over something really important that I consider really important anyway, and that is to remind you again that prevention is the cure. There are things you can do if you're in a healthy body right now that will hopefully prevent you from getting here in the first place. My goal is to keep my story from becoming your story. So here's my list of what I wish I knew ten years ago about breast cancer. The first thing I would do differently had I known, was better sleep. Sleep matters. There are so many studies linking awful sleep to breast cancer. Awful sleep like the kind that mothers get, which was the case for me when my son was young. He's thirteen now, but when he was little, I would sleep maybe three to five hours a night if I was lucky. Because I stayed up in the middle of the night doing all the things I needed to do for myself. I considered it my knee time. I had no idea that not getting enough sleep during the right hours. I'll add that cuts down on your melatonin production severely, and melatonin is one of the hormones the body uses to prevent and fight cancer. So I want you to do your own research. Don't listen to me. Am I a scientist, No, Am I a doctor. No, I'm just a woman who's been wrestling this for six years and struggling to stay alive and doing every single thing I can do back by science, looking at the studies to be here when my son graduates from high school. That's my immediate goal right now, and that's four more years, right and then I'll set a new goalie, because I plan on making that, and then I'll make a new goal and hopefully I'm better by then than I am now, and I have another, you know, five or ten year goal in mind. Anyway, God willing right, So look up the studies yourself. That's what I recommend. There's nothing like seeing the proof for yourself. Because listen, doctors are trained in a certain way. They're amazing, wonderful people who dedicated their lives to helping us, and they only know what they know. You know, they only know what they know, and they're not allowed to talk to you about these things that are outside of their scope of work and what they can offer. So you get them in trouble when you start to press them for telling you these other treatments or go that's not what they do. You have to And this I've learned about even how I treat my friends and people I love. Stop demanding of people's things they can't do. Accept people for where they are. That's been big for me on this journey. Some people cannot show up for me the way I need them to, and some of those people may be really close to me. I can either waste my time trying to demand and expect and wait and hope and dream and pray that they're gonna change, or I can control the only thing I can control, which is me, and decide to let them be who they are and find what I might need from them elsewhere, because that makes the most sense to me. So you get to determine what makes the most sense to you. I'm just sharing what I've learned along the journey. And the next thing that I wished I knew ten years ago was how much of an impact stressful relationships can be on fueling cancer and causing cancer. I'm talking about all kinds of relationships, but ladies, you know, for us, it's really our significant other and being in a state of constant fear, panic, doubt, questioning the relationship, arguing too much or worse all keeps us in a state of chronic stress. Look up how much damage chronic stress does to your body, Lane, so you can start avoiding it, because it's one of the most simple things you can cut out of your life. And when I say cut out, I do mean like taking a scalpel. And you know, because when it comes down to it, you and being alive is more important than any relationship, and that's kind of what I had to come to in my life at the time too. I left my son's dad in September of twenty nineteen. I was diagnosed in January. That whole time things were being clarified, and I don't like to get into details about that because I love and respect my son. I love and respect his dad too, But listen, what happened happened between adults, and I get to share my story, right, I mean, you don't have to agree. The other person is never going to agree with what happened to you because it didn't happen to them, happen to you. But I preserve and protect my son's father because of my son, and so I'm never gonna go too far down that rabbit hole, which it definitely is. But I have bit my forbitten my tongue on it for all this time because I don't want to leave a legacy that my son has to deal with that isn't fair to him. And you know, ultimately it's only my side of the story. Maybe I was a nightmare too. Listen, I'm gonna owe my stuff. But the chronic stress begins to feel normal when you've lived with it so long and it is incredibly dangerous for your body. So that's the next thing I would say. I wish I knew. So let's see number three. They're not ranked in order. These are all just the things I picked up along the way. But the next thing I would say is the biggest one. Everybody says right now, what you feed your body matters. And I'm gonna tell tell you what kind of sugar fiend I was. I was eating maybe four donuts a day. Now, when you're in a chronically stressful situation. For me, food and alcohol became the go to to deal with a lot of what I was dealing with. And I'm not saying it was all about my intimate relationship. There were other stressers in my life too. There were other things that were causing me to be stressed out right. So whichever of the things I was dealing with that was causing me to stay chronic stress, what I went to to help myself was horrible sugar and alcohol. Basically, I was doing mammy juice wine, you know, red wine. It wasn't drinking hard liquor, even though I had at other periods in my life. I was doing wine. Though after I stopped breastfeeding, which I breastfed for about three years, I got my mama juice back because I, of course would never take a risk while while my son would have you know, had some kind of damage or curb potentially. But as soon as I got the green light, I was like, cooh, let's go. And that was, looking back, a horrible decision. I had no idea how much damage alcohol does to the body. We'll get to that in a sect because that's the next one I want to talk about more in depth. Right now, let me stick to the sugar, because the doughnuts were my best friend, and that one has become pretty clear to a lot of people. I think now we understand better than we did. You know seven I guess years ago and when I was in these bad habits fully and I say ten years because if I had started fixing things ten years ago, I would have avoided it completely, because I think I would have caught it before the tumor even started growing. That is debatable because I have no proof. I have no way of proving that right, but that's what I believe. There are a lot of studies getting traction right now about our diets and what we put in our mouth and fuel our bodies with being vital to the outcomes. Now we're not even just talking cancer. I mean, yeah, worst case scenario, but diabetes and a lot of these immunocompromised diseases are being attributed to bad food, and sugar intake absolutely falls into the category of bad. Now we're talking refined sugar, right, Fruit sugars are not as much on the chopping block for me, they are now because I've seen what a difference a kto diet makes to how my body feels while wrestling cancer. I say wrestling because I just don't like the word fighting. I guess it feels more like a wrestle because sometimes it's above, sometimes I'm above. We go back and forth. We dance, but that's too much of a compliment. I'm not dancing with this shit. I'm wrestling and I'd like to win. But basically, refined sugar causes what I just mentioned before with the stress inflammation, and if you're constantly eating it, your body is going to be in chronic inflammation. Refined sugar creates that the seed oils create that all of it causes inflammation, and for the sugar. The insulin spikes all day set you up for not just cancer, but the other stuff I mentioned before, diabetes and some of these immuno suppressive and what like MS. I have a friend who's dealing with MS and has been told to avoid all sugar. There's a reason for that. Your body can only handle so much inflammation. Now, cute inflammation is a logical and healthy and good response from your body. You cut yourself, you want your body to get inflamed around that cut. You want your body to send all the troops over there to help it heal. We're talking chronic inflammation where your body never gets a break. There's this constant inflamed state and your immune system gets worn out trying to put at sech. These fires in LA have been like the fire department had to go to five and six and seven different fires in one day. What the heck? That is too much to expect. That's what is happening to your body when you have these constant inflammations happening all over the place. So I would have changed my diet first, and it is one of the things I changed first when I found out by my diagnosis, because I'd already gone through this with my mom, and I saw that in her chemotherapy appointments that were giving her grape juice and Snickers bars and granola bars, and so I had started doing research way back then and knew that was a horrible choice for them to do. Some places have now come around and they're starting to make healthier choices for their cancer pations, and some haven't. And I think this is just something that is going to take a little time for people to start to change their minds. When people believe they're doing things correctly, this is true for all of us, myself included. When you believe you're doing something right and then you find out you're not, that is a shock to your system and change is difficult. I have witnessed that for myself. Change is difficult. But my diet was horrible thirteen years ago. All right. The next thing is exercise. Now. I have been back and forth on exercise my whole life. I found plans that worked. I did P ninety, Yes, I did the Beast program. I did all these different programs. But my goal was to make my body look the way I wanted it to look. What my goal needed to be about was my circulation and immune system, because when you move, your immune system moves and flushes and goes through and picks up the dirt and junk and starts to get it out and deal with it. And when you don't move, your immune system doesn't move either. Your lymphatic system is a huge part of your immune system. I think like eighty percent of your immune system is made in your lymphatic systems. Listen, don't quote me on these things. Like I said, I'm not a scientist I've been reading a lot of this stuff over the years. I picked it up along the way. Go look at it yourself, because the numbers don't matter. The facts do. And the fact is that your immune system does not have a pump. You are the pump. Your immune and lymphatic system work together. By you pumping them. What pumps your immune and your lymphatic systems working out. And I'm not saying like I can't even lift heavyweights anymore. My skeletal system has a decent amount of cancer in it and it is limited what I'm able to do right now. But when I was it wasn't even about lifting heavyweights. I hear that that's important too, But if you aren't at the place. You know you're not going to go from not working out to doing some body competition. Right, Let's be realistic and let's take baby steps because those are important. To baby steps count. If you're not doing any working out or daily movement, just start by walking. Just start by parking the furthest away from the door, if the story you're going into and getting yourself used to that movement. That's what I've had to do. I've had to reduce the amount of movement to walking. But there was a time where I wasn't moving at all. I would do these programs and fail to meet my body goal of how I wanted to look, and then I would stop, and then I would eat the donetups again and go back to the well. I mean, it's just this vicious cycle that I know I'm not alone in. I'm talking about myself, but I'm probably talking about you or someone you know and love too. And the point is you have a chance to fix it right now if you're in a healthy body right. Stagnation in the immune system is a huge problem when it comes to cancer and other things, and the way you fix that is by moving every day. If you can, I do a two mile walk every day now because that is vital to my survival. You have like a thirty five percent risk cut, right, you cut your risk, I'll say it in a better way. You cut your risk of developing cancer by like thirty five percent just by exercising and walking and moving your body. It's worth every step that you can figure out how to do. The next up is toxins. And one of the biggest ways that I have learned that toxins creep into your body. I mean, yes, what you eat toxic food, right, Yes, you're breathing toxic air. Right. We can control the food part, the air we can control a little less, but what you put on your skin. Your skin is your number one organ, and everything you put on it, from perfumes to creams and lotions that have a bunch of toxins in them, to all of that seeps into your skin. THEEWG dot org has an amazing collection of chemicals that do not belong in our body care, hair care, skin care products. Many of them are still there, but they don't belong there. But you can check them out and find out the things that you need to avoid. We're talking household cleaning products too, and for me. One of the things that I did that was probably a little radical, but I'm in a radical situation, so it calls for radical solutions. I got rid of all the polyester clothing that I had, and I especially wanted to focus on the fabric I sleep And I'd say polyester, but all fabrics made from the waste of gas and oil production is what I mean. So polyester, acrylic, nylon, all the ones that come from it. Again, there's research to be done and everything is googleable. I wanted to focus on the fabric I sleep in because you spend more time in that clothing I do anyway about you when I'm in lounge clothes most of the time. So and also because you're sweating at night, your pores are opening up. Whatever is coming off of that fabric is leeching off of it is going to absorb into your body through your skin. So when I threw away all my polyester, it ended up being like five garbage bags the clothes things I loved. There were cute things in the bag that I was like, no, I can't do it, but I would look at the label. It's like a hundred percent polyester, And then I said, I can't do it. That's what I really can't do is the toxin. So I had to get rid of that stuff. That was again a very kind of dial down. I'm going to go the furthest I can. I'm going to get rid of the most I can. So that was me being extreme. But look at the fabrics. Look at the information about how fabrics can poison your body, and how the things you put on your skin can make you more toxic, because toxins are incredibly important to reduce to avoid developing cancer. Now we'll get to the obvious ones. Reducing alcohol, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, were going to get to a little more and quitting smoking. Now. I smoked for way longer than I'd like to admit. It was one of the nastiest habits I've ever had. I smoked the entire time I was on TV, and I was so ashamed of embarrassed. I was so ashamed and embarrassed I should say of it that I hid it from everybody. Most people who knew me did not know that I smoked unless they were some of the very few people that smoke with me. And we're hiding too. We would go around corners during the beach house anyway to get it all those stories, because listen, the point is letting you know that you need to stop smoking if you're smoking and that alcohol. I know you guys have seen all the information in the last couple of months demonizing alcohol. It's true. Alcohol is a poison, and that's why it makes you feel the way it makes you feel. It's poisoning your body. And the effects you're feeling are your body dealing with poison. It's why it ruins your lover, because your liver has to detox all that poison. And you know they say one drink is all you need to poison your body. I honestly believe that alcohol was a huge fuel for me and this cancer that I'm wrestling, and that's just again my gut. I look at the things I was doing and there was a lot of wine passing my lips. With the alcohol. I stopped cold turkey. I was scared enough and it was something I could give up easily. With the smoking, I used hypnosis high and you recommend took me one time. Never touched cigarette again. I did that more than a decade before the cancer ever, you know, was an issue and was found in my body. But I wish I had done it even sooner. I wish I had gone to some kind of therapy more consistently in my life to start dealing with a lot of the trauma issues that I live with, and just you know, the kind of childhood that I had, and a lot of the things that haunt me because they add to your chronic stress. But also those were the reasons that I was reaching for all this anesthetizing in my life, And had I dealt with those issues a little sooner, I probably would have done less of that. But alcohol and cigarettes and how much of those things you can handle depends on your body. I think in all of these things that I'm talking about, it's all about your specific body. Listen. I know people who have drank I mean hard alcohol. Johnny Walker black type hard alcohol for decades. Grandfather decades of drinking, and his body was fine till he was like seventy eighty. Some bodies are heartier than others. It's just how it is. It's not fair, But most things in this life are not fair. They just were just what they are. So if you notice in your body that you can't take certain things, those are the things you need to get rid of first. But none of the stuff I was doing was worth the risks that I didn't even realize I was taking. And that's why I want you to know those things now. There are more things that I could share with you. I could talk forever about this, because I am really passionate about helping people preserve their lives given where I'm at. But my time is almost step and the bottom line is again it's my mantra, prevention is the cure. If you're in a healthy body, do the things you can do to avoid my story becoming your story. I go into more detail about my journey in the Essence article with beautiful Shakerri rich In on the cover. If you're looking for the hard copy again, Essence dot Com is where you can go online right now to read it for yourself. There's some other great articles in there too. Like I said, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm at I'm Ananda Lewis. I do more discussions about things like this, and I will be doing even more as as I can. It'll be one of the things I start digging into. So I just want to say thank you again to the Let's be clear team for having me, and I am going to and I hope you are to honor Shannon Dougherty's legacy by living our lives boldly like she lived hers. And I hope you had a good time listening to me bent on about these things today. And that's it. I'm Ananda Lewis and it's been real. I'll see you out there.