Thursday, October 11, 2018

Popular 'Top Chef' contestant writes she has a year to live.


SCREEN CAPTURE
Fatima Ali on 'Top Chef'

POPULAR Top Chef contestant Fatima Ali said Tuesday (Oct. 9) is trying to live a lifetime in the year left to her.

The 29-year old Pakistani American chef's cancer cells “are back with a vengeance.”

Ali, voted fan favorite on Season 15 of the Bravo cooking reality show that finished airing in March, wrote her dire diagnosis for Bon Appetit.

“My oncologist has told me that I have a year to live, with or without the new chemotherapy regimen,” she wrote. “I was looking forward to being 30, flirty and thriving. Guess I have to step it up on the flirting. I have no time to lose.”

INSTAGRAM / PADMA LAKSHIMI
'Top Chef' host Padma Lakshimi, left, visits Fatima Ali.
“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,” she added.

According to her Top Chef bio, Ali immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan at age 18, attended the Culinary Institute of America and made a name for herself in the competitive New York City restaurant scene.

Ali was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma in late 2017. After undergoing chemotherapy and surgery she was declared cancer-free. However, she wrote, "The cancer cells my doctors believed had vanished are back with a vengeance in my left hip and femur bone."

A day after Ali announced her diagnosis, her friends and fellow chefs launched a GoFundMe campaign to support her dream of eating her way around the world.

One of the members of Team Fati, as they’re calling themselves, is chef Adrienne Cheatham, who competed against Ali in the same season of Top Chef. In an Instagram post, Cheatham wrote that the group created the campaign in an effort to help Ali experience her “dream to live to the fullest” in the time she has left.

"I was always deathly afraid of being average in any way, and now I desperately wish to have a simple, uneventful life," Ali concluded in her poignant essay.
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