‘Top Chef’ star Fatima Ali’s cancer is back, doctors give her one year to live

Last year, “Top Chef” star Fatima Ali was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma.

As she revealed in an essay for Bon Appetit on Tuesday, Oct.9, the bone and

soft tissue cancer has returned and the prognosis is bad.

“The cancer cells my doctors believed had vanished are back with a vengeance in

my left hip and femur bone,” the Season 15 chef wrote (via Us Weekly).

“My oncologist has told me that I have a year to live, with or without the new chemotherapy regimen.

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.” She continued: “It’s funny, isn’t it?

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.

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.” Fatima continued:

“I’ve spent more time in sterile hospital rooms in the past year than I have in my own apartment.

This has become my new home, and the staff a part of my family. … Everyone’s amazed that I’m taking it so well.

But when you hit rock bottom, there really is no place to go but up.” Though she admitted she was understandably scared, she also said she knew just how she wanted to spend her final months –checking out all the amazing new restaurants New York City has to offer. “I was always deathly afraid of being average in any way,” she admitted. “And now I desperately wish to have a simple, uneventful life.”