Andrew Fairlie: ‘I’ve lived a lot longer than I should have...’
Michelin chef battling brain tumour says he’s ‘feeling great’ – and grateful
SCOTLAND’S only two-starred Michelin chef has spoken about his long battle with a deadly brain tumour as he admitted: ‘I’ve had a lot more time than I should have had.’
Andrew Fairlie, who oversees his eponymous restaurant at Gleneagles Hotel, said he completed his most recent treatment a year ago but told doctors to hold off putting him through an intense course of chemotherapy as his condition had stabilised.
In an interview with a German magazine, he said: ‘I have had four courses of chemotherapy over four years. I’ve had a full course of radiotherapy for six weeks. I’ve been discharged from the hospital. I’m just relying on controlling the tumour at the moment.
‘The tumour could grow. If it starts to grow any more, then it will be fatal. But I’ve always known that eventually the tumour was going to kill me. But I’ve had a lot more time than I should have had. I was lucky in that sense.’
Last night, however, he told the Scottish Daily Mail: ‘I really don’t want the situation to be over-sensationalised.
‘I actually have a good brain tumour, if you can say it like that. I was limited to how many courses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy were going to be effective.
‘There is still a course of intense chemo available to me, which I have elected not to do. I’ve told them I’m feeling great at the moment, seizures have stopped, so I have elected not to go down the onerous path of intensive chemotherapy.
‘I could still go down the route of a 21-day intensive course but we don’t know what the outcome of that would be. And at the moment, I’m not prepared to do that.’
He added: ‘I’ve always considered myself to be fortunate. It is a slow-growing tumour.
‘When I first spoke to my specialist and asked the obvious question, “How long do I have to live?”, he said, “Eight to ten years and you’ll be doing well”. Ever since then, I’ve just got on with life.’
The 54-year-old recalled how the tumour revealed itself via a massive seizure while he was visiting Vietnam with his thengirlfriend in 2005.
‘In the afternoon I was working out in the gym, went back to my hotel room and had a shower,’ he told No Gloss magazine. ‘I came out and, all of a sudden – I can barely describe it – it felt like somebody had taken an electric cord and stuck it into my left hand.’ He was 41. A local doctor diagnosed dehydration and Mr Fairlie resolved to drink more water.
He suffered a second seizure a week later in his kitchen in Glasgow after he had been for a run. His girlfriend, who witnessed the attack, took him to hospital.
An epilepsy expert who was visiting his local hospital sent him for a CT scan.
He returned the next week for the results.
The chef said: ‘He [the professor] said, “I think you have a brain tumour, you need to see a specialist tomorrow morning in the hospital and he will confirm that or not”.’
While many would fall apart at such a potentially lifechanging diagnosis, Mr Fairlie walked out of the consulting room and went to the cinema. He said: ‘I didn’t really register that I have a brain tumour. I didn’t immediately think that it was a fatal thing. I just remember that I thought, “Oh my God, am I going to become an invalid?”. That was my biggest horror. I was very stoical about my fate – it’s there, let’s just get on with it.’
He said he never became depressed by his diagnosis but his biggest worry was that ‘everything that I love would be taken away from me’.
He added: ‘My life was in a really good place at the time, and I didn’t wanted anything to change.’
Mr Fairlie, who has two grown-up daughters from his first marriage and two stepdaughters with his wife, Kate, says family has become the most important thing to him.
He also donates a proportion of the profit from every bill at his restaurant to help fund brain tumour research at Glasgow University.
He said: ‘They’re very hopeful about the progress they’re making in terms of a new drug and technology that can be taken with radiotherapy.’
‘Seizures have stopped’
‘I was very stoical about my fate’