Popular Top Chef Contestant Writes She Has a Year to Live

Popular Top Chef contestant Fatima Ali said Tuesday that she 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.

“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, according to HuffPost. 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.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Hey guys! Sometimes we need to rally, and this is one of those times. Please help. Most of you have read the beautiful article @cheffati wrote in @healthy_ish about her battle with cancer. Let’s try to help her experience all that life has to offer, from hot pot in Queens to @nomacph It is her dream to live to the fullest and visit as many places as she can with the time she has, let’s help her live it up! Link to the @gofundme page in bio ☝?She will receive 100% of the money raised and any money she doesn’t use will go to the Sarcoma Foundation of America to help find a cure! @curesarcoma . https://www.gofundme.com/team-fati . . #teamfati #strength #beauty #fuckcancer

A post shared by Adrienne Cheatham (@chefadriennecheatham) on Oct 10, 2018 at 11:27am PDT

“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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