April Love, an Atlanta, Georgia-based philanthropist, entertainment manager, and brand strategist for A-list celebs, has been a breast cancer thriver for over ten years and has made it her life’s mission to encourage women, especially women of color, to care for their bodies with holistic, preventative, and early detection practices.
Rewind to 2009 on Christmas Eve, Love was informed by her physicians of her stage three ductal carcinoma breast cancer diagnosis after a simple check-up with her physician and her suggestion to get a routine mammogram, given that she was 35 years old at the time.
Shellshocked by the news, Love remained in denial of her diagnosis and ignored calls from her healthcare team to schedule chemotherapy treatments. She found the inner strength to face her diagnosis head-on by leading breast care awareness cause events for women to receive accurate education, adequate support, and financial assistance while undergoing various treatments.
Love entered remission one year after undergoing two months of chemotherapy, six weeks of radiation treatments, and surgery. Today, she continues her philanthropic efforts as the creator, host, and executive producer of The Pink Awards.
This annual charity event raises funds for breast cancer patients who cannot financially support their families while undergoing treatment. In 2022, the Charge Up Campaign awarded April its Community Impact Award in recognition of her efforts to increase breast care awareness among women of color.
We spoke to Love about her journey with breast cancer, how she’s helping other women with her organization, and how she continues to thrive.
ESSENCE: Speak to me about your experience with breast cancer.
April Love: I am a 13-year-old thriver, as I like to call it, because surviving sometimes tends to sound a little bit like I’m just hanging on until things change, and I just don’t feel that way. I feel like I’ve had the journey with cancer, and it served its purpose in my life and created purpose for me.
I went in for an annual exam, and my doctor put me in for a radiology appointment. She initially wanted to check my thyroid and then scheduled me for a mammogram. I was in my 30s, so a mammogram wasn’t necessarily something that had been on my radar. After the mammogram, the doctors said they’d like to test me again. Afterward, they took me back to see the radiologist, showed me an area of my breast that they were concerned with, and suggested having a biopsy done. After the biopsy, I received the result around Christmas Eve from the same breast surgeon, and she asked me if I was by myself, which was alarming. She said, “Well, what we feared is the case you do have breast cancer, and it’s pretty advanced. It’s stage three.”
The surgeon wanted me to come in the day after Christmas to begin a breast care plan. So, I spent that holiday thinking about everything from mastectomies to whether I wanted to have children, which resulted in a mental breakdown. The surgeon didn’t hear from me until early 2010 after they conducted a wellness check. Once they could catch me on the phone, she asked me, “Do you want to live?”
The light bulb went off, and I realized, “Yes, I do.” That day was weeks after the diagnosis was confirmed, and so I began my journey.
Did your primary care physician see something wrong? Or was it just, “Hey, you are at a certain age. We think you should get a mammogram.” Or did you feel like something was wrong?
To this day, I don’t know. She never said if she felt anything in my breast. I’m sure she did because I immediately felt a lump when I saw the image and the problem area.
Identifying breast cancer in Black women can be difficult as we have a lot of fatty tissue and a lot of lumps and bumps in our breasts. Did you have any leakage, any type of nipple discoloration, or any other symptoms?
No! And for it to be stage three cancer, I had no symptoms. Nothing even gave me an inkling of what was going on. There was no leakage, localized pain, or discoloration, but we realized I had a golf ball-sized tumor. So, surprisingly, I did not.
Can you speak to the specific type of breast cancer you had?
My breast cancer was an estrogen receptor ductal carcinoma. It’s important to know the source of the cancer cell and how it got there. My cancer is more hormonal-based, and it’s a slow-progressing one. Still, it’s a very, for lack of a better word, a popular cancer because as young women, you know, we, especially Black women, have irregular periods. I was on birth control to regulate my period. I believe that my cancer came about from the surge of estrogen in my body. So, that slow-growing tumor was probably about ten years old in my body. Doctors or whoever may disagree with what I say, but I attribute it to the birth control that I was taking as a teenager.
So why did you ignore the treatment recommendations at first, and what was your turning point?
To be quite honest, it was, you know, just plain old fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the misconception that people automatically associate a diagnosis of cancer with inevitable death. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my body. I know I didn’t want to cut off both of my breasts. There was a mixture of so many unknowns that I didn’t have the capacity for.
So when you do decide to get treatment, you go for chemo, right? Can you talk our readers through that decision?
I was really into holistic medicine, alternative remedies, and other healing modalities. And so when I tell you, I 110% did not want to do any chemotherapy. But when I had the conversation with my breast surgeon and understood what stage I was at and the fact that I did want to live, I put it in God’s hands and decided to do chemotherapy.
My process was nontraditional because they usually try to do surgery immediately. However, in my case, they wanted to shrink the cancer. Also, I did have one lymph node, which was concerning because that’s a sign of metastasized cancer that moves around in the body. So I knew I had to move quickly.
So I did the chemo, first the surgery, and then the radiation. But it was awful. I had adriamycin, and in our community, it’s called the “Red Devil,” and it’s by far the worst thing I’ve probably experienced. I’ve always said, “This is as close as I could get to death without being dead,” Because I would have to make decisions like, am I going to go to the bathroom, or am I going to go to the refrigerator, get some water? Because I didn’t have any energy. I was nauseous. I lost 40 pounds. My nails turned black. I lost my hair, so everything from the physical issues to even the vanity of becoming this sick person in the mirror, chemotherapy is not something I would wish on my worst enemy, but it was a decision I felt I needed to make.
Now that you are well into remission, how do you feel about overcoming breast cancer?
It was traumatizing, it was painful, it was uncomfortable. But it awakened something in me.
Can you tell me why you created the Pink Awards and decided to help other women battling breast cancer?
It kind of was birthed during my time doing these pink parties. I was always a publicist and event planner. I worked in entertainment, so I was already social, and I was blessed to have such a community of people around me: friends and family. They would bring me food. But I understood there were so many disparities, so much misinformation, and little advocacy. If people were diagnosed, it was not even giving them options. There were some support groups, but for the most part, these organizations and I don’t discount their work. They are aligned with Big Pharma, and their goals are to get better medicine or to support treatment. And I wanted to amplify the disparities in our community. I wanted people to understand that this cancer is killing people every day, and this illness will touch you; even if it’s not you directly, it will indirectly.
The Pink Awards brings attention and awareness, and the work reaches and informs the people. That’s why I started it: to amplify the message about the deficits I personally know exist in our community.