As a certified nutritionist and avid runner, Beth Kitchin has maintained a healthy lifestyle her entire life.
She ate well, loved running, hiking and lifting weights, ran a couple of marathons and practiced yoga and tai chi. Kitchin had “absolutely” no health problems — until she began feeling persistent pain in one of her legs in the fall of 2020.
“She was extremely healthy,” Kitchin, now 60 and living in Birmingham, Alabama, told .com.
“He was actually a very cheap person for my insurance company,” he added.
Still, the pain – on the inside of her left thigh – continued to bother her. She felt like she was pulling a muscle, perhaps from over-exertion or a running injury, she thought.
The physiotherapist who treated her thought it was bursitis – inflammation caused by overuse of a joint – but requested an MRI to obtain a proper diagnosis.
“My worst nightmare”
Hours before her MRI in February 2021, Kitchin — a retired nutrition professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — was feeling carefree, posing for photos demonstrating exercises for an upcoming health study.
But after the MRI, a doctor urgently wanted to speak to Kitchin by phone. The scan revealed tumors on both legs that looked like metastatic bone cancer. The finding looked like a death sentence.
“It was like my worst nightmare,” she recalled. “My boyfriend came over and we started crying and talking about what we were going to do. We were planning my death.”
But the real diagnosis was yet to come. If it was metastatic bone cancer, where was the original cancer? Doctors couldn’t find it. All of Kitchin’s test results were normal, and she felt fine, apart from that nagging pain in her leg.
Finally, a biopsy of the femur tumors revealed the answer.
“I was told I didn’t have metastatic bone cancer, but rather treatable acute lymphoblastic leukemia,” she said.
“So, as strange as it may seem, having someone tell me I have leukemia was a huge relief.”
What is acute lymphoblastic leukemia?
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is an aggressive blood cancer that affects a type of white blood cell, according to the National Cancer Institute.
It begins with a change in a single bone marrow stem cell, which then multiplies into billions of mutated cells, causing a shortage of normal blood cells, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
There is no clear cause or way to prevent the disease, according to the organization.
This blood cancer can cause bone lesions in rare cases, so bone or joint pain is one of the symptoms. Kitchin did not have any of the most common warning signs, such as fatigue, shortness of breath and paleness.
The disease is treatable, but the treatment is brutal.
Kitchin first needed chemotherapy in hospital to destroy as many cancer cells as possible. When Kitchin was admitted to the hospital in April 2021, he was in “absolutely excruciating pain” from the bone tumors.
‘Red Devil’ Chemotherapy
One of the chemotherapy drugs he received during his two-and-a-half-week stay was nicknamed Red Devil because it is crimson in color, and it is so toxic that nurses had to wear masks when they injected it into their bodies.
Following that hospital stay, Kitchin received three more chemotherapy treatments during stays that lasted about five days each. He ended up watching the entire series of The Golden Girls (The Golden Girls) and became a fan of the HGTV channel during her hospital stays.
Kitchin relaxes at home after the first round of weeks of chemotherapy.
The goal of chemotherapy was to keep her in remission until she could find a stem cell donor and undergo a transplant, which would provide her with new, healthy hematopoietic cells (an immature cell that can develop into all types of blood cells, such as white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets). A compatible donor was found through a list of people.
The stem cell transplant took place on August 31, 2021.
“It looked like tomato sauce in the bag,” Kitchin recalled of seeing the donated stem cells. “I already had an (intravenous) port and you just lay there and they transfuse you. (…) There’s nothing exciting about it.”
‘Rocky’ recovers his health
Just when Kitchin’s health seemed to be improving, he suffered a setback several months after his transplant.
The donor’s stem cells began attacking her healthy cells, a complication known as graft-versus-host disease, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
She suffered severe inflammation, skin rashes, liver problems, mouth sores and other symptoms. She was weak, stiff and unable to walk.
“I was horrified by my body,” she said. “I would look at myself and see a stranger staring back at me. I was horrified. I had never felt bad about my body.”
“I was angry. I felt like my body had betrayed me in some way,” Kitchin said.
Medications for each symptom helped control the ordeal. A physical therapist got him walking again. He joined a gym in January 2023 and was able to lift weights and walk on a treadmill again.
Currently, he spends two hours a day exercising: taking walks in the open air, running and stretching.
She is doing well, but still has dizziness and neuropathy in her feet from chemotherapy. Kitchin is able to lead a normal life, but her nurse told her to prepare for some health problems.
Kitchin will be back to normal in the fall of 2024. He loves Halloween.
The dietician never took medication before her diagnosis, but now she has to rely on a long list of them. After seeing how much drugs cost, she has become an activist for affordable medicine.
The surprise of it all still shakes her. People think that a healthy life means that they will not get sick, but that is not the case, she said.
“I was angry. I felt like my body had betrayed me in some way. I felt like the universe was making fun of me,” she said.
“I am now aware of things I never thought I would have to be aware of. (…) It is normal to be angry. It is normal to be tired. But you get over it,” she said.
