'From Scratch' author Tembi Locke recalls 1st sign of late husband's cancer: 'So stunned'

Tembi Locke, the author behind the book "From Scratch" which was adapted into a Netflix series, revealed the first symptom that later led to her husband's cancer diagnosis on the May 22 episode of "Making Space" with TODAY's Hoda Kotb.

Locke said she and her late husband, Saro Gullo, an Italian chef, had just moved Los Angeles when they went to a yoga class.

"Believe it or not, he kind of hurt his knee in the class. And we didn’t really think that much of it," Locke said. "But it lingered."

Gullo went to get imaging done, and Locke said "it became clear within about a couple of weeks that there was something more than just a meniscus that was torn."

"It was leiomyosarcoma," Locke said. "There was a lesion in his knee, in the soft tissue and the bone." He was diagnosed in 2002 and lived for 10 more years.

Leiomyosarcoma is a rare, aggressive type of cancer that begins in smooth muscle tissue, and is often found in the digestive system, urinary system, blood vessels and uterus, according to the Mayo Clinic.

"It was a page one rewrite of life, because I was 31 at the time," Locke said. "We were in the prime of everything."

While speaking to Hoda, Locke, now 53, said she had to pause, even now, as the feelings returned as she talked about the diagnosis.

"That moment, when you get the diagnosis, it's so arresting," she said. "Even just talking about it, I feel like my body remembers it. I just remember being so stunned."

Locke described working with an oncologist, who she said didn't tell them what stage of cancer Gullo had.

"I think that moment-by-moment living was a gift to us," she said. "Because from the jump, it allowed us to just be present in our lives and with each other in the best way we could, under the circumstances."

"From Scratch," Locke's bestselling memoir, followed Gullo and Locke’s early romance in Florence, Italy, as well as their challenges navigating a long-distance, cross-cultural relationship before Gullo moved to the U.S. Many of the pair's milestones were included in the Netflix series of the same name starring Zoe Saldana.

The pair also later adopted a daughter, Zoela, who was 7 years old at the time of Gullo's death in 2012 from complications from cancer.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com