Dietitian Shares Subtle Leg Symptom That Turned Out to Be Leukemia
What was initially thought to be muscle strain was actually cancer.
Like most minor health issues, leg pain comes and goes for any number of reasons. In most cases, it's nothing serious—maybe you pulled your hamstring or you're suffering from a muscle cramp. But for Beth Kitchin, a registered dietitian and avid runner, it turned out to be something that required immediate medical attention: Her leg pain was a subtle symptom of leukemia.
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In a new interview with Today, Kitchin said she has always been an "extremely healthy" person. Her diet was good, and she loved to jog, hike, lift weights, and run marathons, as well as practice yoga and tai chi.
"I really was a very cheap person for my insurance company," she told the news outlet.
In fact, Kitchin said she had "absolutely" no health problems for most of her life—until she started feeling a pain in one of her legs in fall 2020. The now 60-year-old described the pain as an ache on the inside of her left thigh. While bothersome, she assumed it was a pulled muscle either from exercise.
The physical medicine doctor she first visited thought it was bursitis, as Kitchin told Today. This condition, which is the "inflammation or irritation of a bursa sac," is fairly common in adults over the age of 40, and is "usually caused by repeated pressure on an area or by using a joint too much," according to WebMD.
Still, to get a proper diagnosis, the doctor ordered an MRI for Kitchin. The scan was scheduled for Feb. 2021, and the dietitian told Today that she wasn't expecting anything bad. After the MRI, however, a doctor told her that her scan had revealed tumors in both of her legs that looked like metastatic bone cancer.
"It was like my worst nightmare," she told Today. "My boyfriend came over, and we just cried and talked about, 'What are we going to do?' We were planning for me to die."
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Ultimately, a biopsy of the tumors on her thigh bone revealed a different cancer diagnosis.
"They said you don't have metastatic bone cancer; you have acute lymphoblastic leukemia and it's treatable," Kitchin explained in her Today interview. "So, oddly enough, someone telling me I have leukemia was a big relief."
As the Mayo Clinic explains, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a "type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow." It's more common in children, but can also occur in adults. Bone or joint pain is a possible symptom of ALL, and occurs when leukemia cells build up near the surface of a bone or inside a joint, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).
But Kitchin didn't experience any of the other common symptoms of ALL, such as fever, pale skin, fatigue, or shortness of breath.
The 60-year-old is somewhat back to normal now. She underwent chemotherapy and then a stem cell transplant on Aug. 31, 2021. After some complications, she was able to join a gym in Jan. 2023 and started lifting weights again, she told Today.
Still, she relies on medications to keep her health in check, and the randomness of her cancer still shakes her. She told Today that many people (including herself) believe that living healthy will stop them from getting sick, but that's not the case.
"I was angry. I felt like my body had betrayed me in some ways," Kitchin said. "I have this new vigilance about things that I never thought I would have to be vigilant about … It's normal to be angry. It's normal to be weary. But you work through it."
