Young & Resilient ‘Antiques Roadshow’ Star Theo Burrell, 38, Says She Was ‘Determined’ Not to Let Her Brain Cancer ‘Overshadow’ Her Soon-to-Be Husband’s 40th Birthday
Young & Resilient ‘Antiques Roadshow’ Star Theo Burrell, 38, Says She Was ‘Determined’ Not to Let Her Brain Cancer ‘Overshadow’ Her Soon-to-Be Husband’s 40th Birthday
Taking a Moment to Celebrate Life's Milestones Despite Battling Cancer
“Antiques Roadshow” star Theo Burrell, 38, continues to embrace major life moments nearly four years after her glioblastoma diagnosis, celebrating her soon-to-be husband Alex’s 40th birthday shortly after undergoing brain surgery.
Diagnosed with the most aggressive form of brain cancer in 2022, Burrell has defied the odds through multiple treatments—including chemotherapy and recent brain surgery—allowing her to reach milestones she once feared she wouldn’t see, which include seeing her son in Kindergarten, her husband’s milestone birthday, and an upcoming wedding.
“If you’re suspected of having a tumor on imaging and our neurosurgeons think that tumor can come out, they will take a piece of that tumor out first and confirm in the operating room and with our pathologists that, in fact, what they are looking at is a tumor,” explains Dr. Alexandra Miller, Director of the Neuro-Oncologist Division at NYU Langone Health, in an interview with SurvivorNet.
Even though surgery can remove a large part of the tumor, any remaining cancer cells can continue to grow over time, leading to the tumor’s return. For this reason, surgery is often followed by other treatments, like radiation or chemotherapy, to try to eliminate any remaining cells.
“The goal is to remove as much of the tumor as we can while keeping the patient well neurologically,” Dr. Reid Thompson, Chair of Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, tells SurvivorNet. In other words, to remove as much of the tumor as possible without causing harm to the patient.
“Because of this unique quality of metastatic brain disease, an oncology team will have to monitor a patient indefinitely during remission,” Dr. Krishanthan Vigneswaran, a neurosurgeon with UT Health Houston and Memorial Hermann, tells SurvivorNet.
Brain tumors don’t always cause noticeable symptoms, but they can significantly affect brain function and overall health. Common signs include headaches, memory loss, confusion, balance issues, vision changes, and shifts in mood or personality.
“Antiques Roadshow” star Theo Burrell, 38, is nearly four years into her brain cancer journey, but she refuses to let her diagnosis overshadow the moments that matter most—including celebrating her soon-to-be husband’s 40th birthday.
“My partner, Alex, turned 40 on 6th January, the day after my surgery. I was determined that brain cancer was not going to overshadow his big day,” she shared on Instagram.
Burrell and Alex have been together for 13 years and share a son; the couple plans to marry in just a few weeks. Marking Alex’s milestone felt especially meaningful.
“We had a great evening, and we suitably embarrassed Alex with a cake and ‘happy birthday.’ Although I’m boring myself by saying this—I did not think 3.5 years ago I had a hope of seeing 2026 and celebrating Alex’s 40th with him—but I have,” she wrote.
Burrell first noticed symptoms of what would become her stage 4 brain cancer in December 2021. She was later diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of glioma known for its rapid growth and limited average survival.
Despite the statistics, with treatment, average survival is about 15 months; without treatment, it often drops to less than six. She has continued to defy expectations, pursuing treatments that allow her to keep living fully and reaching milestones she once feared she’d miss.
She has undergone chemotherapy, multiple treatments, and, most recently, brain surgery. By late January, she shared a small but meaningful victory: her stitches were beginning to fall out as her surgical scars were healing.
“Taking the wins, however small or large,” she wrote alongside a photo of her recovery.
Milestone moments during or after a cancer journey often carry heightened meaning. Whether it’s a child’s first word, a birthday, a graduation, a promotion, or even a quiet triumph like cooking a meal from scratch — these moments remind patients that joy still lives in the everyday.
A cancer diagnosis doesn’t extinguish the fire that fuels life’s joys. Many survivors report a deeper sense of gratitude and presence after diagnosis. And for some, milestones are directly tied to their cancer journey — such as completing treatment, ringing the remission bell, or celebrating a “cancerversary.”
Inside Brain Tumor Surgery and Recovery: What Patients Like Burrell Can Expect
Surgery to remove a brain tumor is delicate by nature, and every movement inside the skull must balance precision with safety.
“We take off the bone overlaying the area we need to get to. We open the little envelope around the brain called the dura, and then we move through the brain tissue to get to where the tumor is to try to cut out as much as we can safely, without hurting the patient’s function or other important things like big blood vessels that can cause things like a stroke,” explains says board-certified neurosurgeon at Emory University School of Medicine Dr. Kimberly Hoang.
Following surgery, patients are closely monitored and often receive radiation to prevent tumor regrowth—particularly in cases where multiple tumors or metastatic disease are involved.
WATCH: What To Expect From Your Glioma Surgery
“Because many patients can have more than one brain tumor or metastasis from their cancer, it was not reasonable to think about surgery for them,” Dr. Hoang tells SurvivorNet. “They also get radiation for those spots as well, to try to keep those tumors from growing or shrink them down.”
Treatment Advancements & the Challenge of the Blood-Brain Barrier
Chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies have long been effective in treating cancer throughout the body. But the brain’s natural defense — the blood-brain barrier — makes these treatments less effective when it comes to brain tumors.
This barrier is “a network of blood vessels and tissue…made up of closely spaced cells and helps keep harmful substances from reaching the brain,” according to the National Cancer Institute.
Still, Dr. Hoang notes that recent advancements in drug design are beginning to improve treatment efficacy in the brain.
Understanding Side Effects of Brain Tumor Treatment
Side effects vary depending on the tumor’s size, location, and number of lesions present.
“Radiation treatment can cause swelling in the tumor as the tumor ‘dies,’ and the surrounding tissue can also become swollen as the treatment takes effect,” Dr. Krishanthan Vigneswaran, a neurosurgeon with UT Health Houston and Memorial Hermann, tells SurvivorNet.
“This swelling can cause symptoms of headache, nausea, vomiting, and neurological loss of function…Surgical resection can also induce swelling, but this is more transient.”
Tumor location often determines what symptoms emerge:
“If it’s near your movement area, movement on one side of the body can be affected. If it’s near your speech area, your speech and the way you form words and express them can be affected,” Dr. Hoang explains.
She also notes brain surgery tends to be less painful than other types — like spinal or abdominal — due to fewer nerves in the surgical area.
WATCH: Biopsy or Surgery First? How Surgeons Decide With Glioma Patients
Recovery & Long-Term Monitoring
“Because of this unique quality of metastatic brain disease, an oncology team will have to monitor a patient indefinitely during remission,” Dr. Vigneswaran says.
Many experts recommend joining a support group — especially one with people who’ve undergone similar procedures. Their lived experience can offer comfort and practical advice.
“Support groups can be incredibly helpful to patients and are commonly offered at major cancer centers and hospitals,” says Dr. Jennifer Moliterno, Chief of Neurosurgical Oncology at Yale Cancer Center.
Mental health professionals are also often part of the care team, helping patients manage the emotional effects of surgery, treatment, and recovery.
Understanding Burrell’s Glioblastoma Diagnosis
Diagnosing gliomas involves a multi-step approach that includes clinical assessment, imaging studies, histopathological examination, and molecular testing.
As patients are diagnosed, they’re observed for typical glioma symptoms. These may include:
Headaches
Seizures
Cognitive or Behavioral Changes
Visual or Speech Changes and Impairments
Loss of Body Weight and Deconditioning
Changes in mental function, mood, or personality
Changes in speech
Sensory changes in hearing, smell, and sight
Loss of balance
Changes in your pulse and breathing rate
During the clinical assessment, the physician will take a detailed history, focusing on the onset and progression of symptoms. Since gliomas can present with non-specific symptoms that overlap with other neurological conditions, ruling out conditions like stroke, infections, or inflammatory disorders is essential during the initial clinical evaluation.
Patients then undergo a neurological exam that tests cranial nerve function, motor strength and coordination, sensory function, and cognitive abilities.
Next, patients undergo an MRI, which provides doctors with a visualization of the tumor.
“If you’re suspected of having a tumor on imaging and our neurosurgeons think that tumor can come out, they will take a piece of that tumor out first and confirm in the operating room and with our pathologists that, in fact, what they are looking at is a tumor,” Dr. Alexandra Miller, Director of the Neuro-Oncologist Division at NYU Langone Health, tells SurvivorNet. “And if it is, they resect it at that time. It’s not usually a two-step procedure.”
If surgery cannot be performed due to tumor location or patient-specific factors, a less invasive stereotactic biopsy can be obtained. Once the tissue sample is obtained, it’s examined under a microscope for molecular testing. At this stage, the tumor is given a grade, which determines how aggressive it is.
WATCH: Molecular testing for glioma patients
Grade I-II gliomas – These are considered low-grade and tend to grow slowly. “The grade one is a very indolent, benign tumor that can be cured with surgery alone,” Dr. Henry Friedman, Deputy Director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke, tells SurvivorNet.
Grade III gliomas—These are considered high-grade and tend to grow more rapidly. They are typically classified as malignant and require more aggressive treatment, which can include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
Grade IV gliomas – These are the most aggressive gliomas, which are locally aggressive and require treatment intensification. Glioblastomas are the most common grade IV glioma, “which is by far the most well-known and feared tumor in the lay population and, quite frankly, the medical population,” Dr. Friedman explains.
How Are Gliomas Treated?
Burrell has already undergone surgery to remove her tumor, followed by chemotherapy and radiation, which helped extract the remaining bits of the cancer that surgery could not remove. Specific details of her ongoing treatment remain unclear at this time. However, the route she took early on is typical for glioblastoma treatment.
“The first step is always the neurosurgery. How much can you take out? Is it safe to do surgery? Do you have to rely on a biopsy? Can you even do a biopsy?” Dr. Friedman tells SurvivorNet.
The main treatment options are:
Observation—Some benign, small, and asymptomatic gliomas or tumors located in inoperable locations can be recommended for observation.
Surgery is often the first-line treatment for gliomas, with the goal of achieving maximal safe resection, where the largest amount of tumor is removed without causing significant neurologic deficits. For low-grade gliomas, surgery alone can sometimes be curative.
After surgery, pathologists examine the tumor tissue to understand its features and molecular makeup. This added step helps doctors outline an appropriate treatment.
“We go through a very elaborate process of diagnostics, which includes looking at it under the microscope through our pathology team,” Dr. Friedman explained to SurvivorNet.
WATCH: The Role of Surgery in Treating Gliomas
Radiation and chemotherapy are often needed after surgery because removing the tumor completely is usually not possible due to the tumor’s ability to spread into surrounding brain tissue.
Radiation therapy uses high–energy X–rays to target and kill tumor cells. It is often used after surgery to target residual tumor cells. Chemotherapy – These medications kill or slow the growth of cancer cells. Chemotherapy can be used alongside radiation or following radiation and is often used in higher-grade tumors.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved some drug treatments, including temozolomide (Temodar), to help patients with this aggressive disease. Temozolomide is a chemotherapy drug patients can take after surgery and radiation therapy.
Targeted therapy and immunotherapy are newer treatments designed to target specific genetic mutations in the tumor or to stimulate the immune system to fight the cancer. Their role in the treatment of gliomas is continuing to evolve.
Other FDA-approved drugs for treating glioblastoma include lomustine (Gleostine), intravenous carmustine (Bicnu), carmustine wafer implants, and Avastin (bevacizumab).
Avastin is a targeted drug therapy that blocks glioblastoma cells from requesting new blood vessels that feed and allow the tumor to grow.
The FDA approved Vorasidenib, an IDH inhibitor. It works by blocking the mutated enzyme, slowing tumor growth, and extending the time before disease progression. IDH mutant gliomas tend to grow more slowly and have a better prognosis than IDH wild-type gliomas.
Dr. Alexandra Miller tells SurvivorNet that Vorasidenib is a “huge breakthrough for people with IDH mutant tumors.”
“What I tell my patients is that we have these effective treatments, but what they do is they delay the time to when this tumor comes back. Only in exceptional circumstances would we ever talk about getting rid of one of these cancers, a few,” Dr. Daniel Wahl, professor of radiation and oncology at the University of Michigan, tells SurvivorNet.
Burrell’s Cancer Journey
Burrell’s cancer journey began in 2022 when she was diagnosed with glioblastoma.
“Receiving my diagnosis, at the age of 35, when my son was one year old, was devastating,” Burrell previously told U.K.-based news outlet The Sun.
Burrell is among the team of experts that appeared on the popular television show that comes from auction houses. She appeared on the British version of the show, which tours throughout the U.K., valuing various treasures and trinkets. She has been a part of the show since 2018.
Theo Burrell has been diagnosed with glioblastoma.
However, she says things changed seemingly in a flash after her diagnosis.
“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,” Burrell said.
After being diagnosed, Burrell said she immediately underwent surgery to remove the tumor. She also had chemotherapy and radiation. She said in a recent interview that since her diagnosis, she’s gone through the rigors of treatment.
“I’ve lost my hair, I’m no longer allowed to drive, and I’m no longer able to work,” she said.
“What followed was months of surgery and treatment to try and prolong my life, and … I continue to make the best of each day,” Burrell added, saying she’s “doing quite well.”
Since her diagnosis, Burrell has become a brain cancer advocate.
Questions for Your Doctor
If you have been diagnosed with glioblastoma, here are some questions you may consider asking your doctor:
What stage is my brain cancer?
What are the treatment options for my brain cancer?
Am I a good candidate for temozolomide?
Am I a good candidate for Optune?
What are the risks and benefits of the recommended treatment?
What are the side effects of the recommended treatment?
How long will it take to recover from treatment, and will I be able to return to work and normal activities?
What’s the likelihood that insurance will cover the recommended treatment?
