Around 2016, Mary Witkop noticed a bump on the inside of her right knee. Concerned, she visited several doctors and they all agreed that the mass was likely harmless. “I saw probably five or six doctors who all told me that it was a lipoma, which is like fatty tissue,” Witkop, 64, of Beulah, Michigan, tells TODAY.
com. “I did have a doctor tell me that if it was bothering me, appearance wise, she would send me to a surgeon.” After meeting with a surgeon in the summer of 2018, Witkop decided to delay having it removed.
When she returned to meet with the surgeon months later, he noticed the bump had changed and sent Witkop for scans of the mass. In February 2019, Witkop learned why the lump grew so much in a short period of time — it was an aggressive type of soft tissue cancer. “It had just been improperly diagnosed because nobody had done any imaging,” Witkop says.
“They were just diagnosing me based on the looks.” When Witkop visited the surgeon in 2018, he said she’d have to keep her knee dry for two weeks if she had surgery. That meant Witkop and her husband would have to skip days on the nearby river during the hot summer months.
So, she opted to wait and returned to the doctor at the end of 2018. “He told me that it felt or looked a little bit different,” she says. “He wanted me to get some testing.
” That surgeon sent her for an X-ray and then an MRI and by February 2019, she was diagnosed with stage 3 undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma, an a.
