Thursday, March 28, 2024

‘Top Chef’ Fatima Ali Reveals Rare Cancer is Back, Has a Year to Live

* “Top Chef” contestant Fatima Ali recently penned a moving essay for Bon Appetit’s Healthyish in which she reveals that a rare form of cancer she battled with last year has returned “with a vengeance” and that she has just about a year to live.

Ali, 29, was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma — a very rare form of bone cancer — in October 2017.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she writes. “When we think we have all the time in the world to live, we forget to indulge in the experiences of living.”

“When that choice is yanked away from us, that’s when we scramble to feel,” she continues. “I am desperate to overload my senses in the coming months, making reservations at the world’s best restaurants, reaching out to past lovers and friends, and smothering my family, giving them the time that I so selfishly guarded before.”

OTHER NEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED: Black Police Officer Turned Business Owner Launches Event Space

“I suspect I won’t last very long,” she adds. “There’s a faint feeling deep inside my gut like a rumble of passing air, ever expanding and filling slowly until, one day, I’ll pop.”

Us Weekly spoke to Dr. Will Eward, MD, DVM, Orthopedic Oncologist at the Duke Cancer Institute to find out more about Ewing’s sarcoma.

Eward has not treated Ali but said that even in her case, there’s still hope.

 “I really don’t think oncologists should be in the business of telling people how long they have to live. Because you don’t really know until you see how the cancer responds to the treatment you hit it with. So I think Fatima, from what little I know about her case, she could go on some different, what’s called rescue chemotherapy and she could have a really good response.”

Dr. Eward said Ewing’s sarcoma “is unusual in that it does give you these symptoms of fatigue and of malaise (generalized weakness) of just not feeling well.”

Other symptoms include bone pain which Eward says is an early indicator.

“If you have bone pain and you haven’t had an injury, and it doesn’t go away, see your doctor and get it worked up,” he said. “Get some X-rays, find out what’s going on. Is it likely that you’re going to have Ewing’s sarcoma? No. But a lot of the people we see with Ewing’s sarcoma, it’s a delayed diagnosis. They’ve been told, ‘Oh you just have a sprain or you just have a bruise.’”

There is no precancerous screening test for Ewing’s. “Once you have it, you have it. Once you have symptoms, you have it.”

Meanwhile, Ali noted in her essay “I was always deathly afraid of being average in any way, and now I desperately wish to have a simple, uneventful life.”

 

We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!

YOU MAY LIKE

SEARCH

- Advertisement -

TRENDING