21 June 2023 , 14:52
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An Antiques Roadshow star has shared an update on her health after being diagnosed with brain cancer.
Theo Burrell revealed she had been diagnosed with an aggressive grade four glioblastoma a year ago
She immediately underwent surgery to remove the tumour and further treatment to shrink it, with the average survival rate for someone with a glioblastoma being 12 to 18 months.
Just 25% of patients tend to survive more than one year and just 5% of patients survive more than five years.
Theo lives in East Lothian with her partner Alex Leaver, 37, and their two-year-old son, Jonah and now plans to fundraise money for research into the disease.
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Theo found fame on Antiques Roadshow (BBC)Speaking to The Sun, Theo said: "Receiving my diagnosis, at the age of 35, when my son was one-year-old, was devastating.
"Overnight everything had changed. Suddenly I’d gone from being a healthy person in the middle of my life with a new baby, to having incurable cancer with maybe only a year or two left to live.
"What followed was months of surgery and treatment to try and prolong my life, and although I continue to make the best of each day, my tumour will return and it will kill me.
"My care has been excellent and new advances in science have helped me fight cancer so far. However, only by funding research into brain tumours can we get closer to a life-saving cure."
Theo, who has been the ceramics expert on Antiques Roadshow since 2018, has been helping to organise an online auction in aid of the The Brain Tumour Charity.
The online sale, which is called Piece of Mind: The Brain Tumour Charity, is being run by auction firm Lyonand Turnbull, where Theo has worked as an auctioneer since 2011.
Theo explained the reason she was doing the auction was " about keeping up the work of people like Baroness Tessa Jowell and Laura Nuttall".
She added: "When you get diagnosed with something like a glioblastoma in your 30s, you really need these people, you need to see that what they are doing and even though these tumours have killed people and we have lost Tessa and Laura, they turned a very difficult situation into something which helped other people."