As a registered dietitian and avid runner, Beth Kitchin has had a healthy routine all her life. She ate well, loved to jog, hike and lift weights, ran a couple of marathons, and practiced yoga and tai chi. Kitchin had “absolutely” no health problems — until she started feeling a nagging pain in one of her legs in the fall of 2020.
“I was extremely healthy,” Kitchin, now 60, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, tells TODAY.com. “I really was a very cheap person for my insurance company.
” Still, the ache — on the inside of her left thigh — kept bothering her. It felt like a pulled muscle, perhaps from exercise overuse or a running injury, she wondered. The physical medicine doctor she was referred to thought it was — inflammation from overusing a joint — but ordered an MRI to get a proper diagnosis.
Just hours before the scan in February 2021, Kitchin — a retired assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — was feeling carefree and posing for photos demonstrating exercises for an upcoming health study. But after the MRI, a doctor urgently wanted to talk with Kitchin on the phone. The scan revealed tumors in both of her legs that looked like metastatic bone cancer, he said.
It seemed like a death sentence. “It was like my worst nightmare,” she recalls. “My boyfriend came over, and we just cried and talked about, ‘What are we going to do?’ We were planning for me to die.
” But the true diagnosis was yet to come. I.