Indianapolis mother raising awareness for sarcoma loses 16-year-old daughter
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — If you ask Lakisha Lately to describe her 16-year-old daughter, Destini Fuqua, she would use the word “diva.”
A diva who loved to dance and play sports while enjoying friends and family. In November 2019, that started to change.
“She first started saying that she had stomach pain or her side was hurting,” Lately said.
She says after some initial testing, doctors assured Lately and Destini everything was fine. They assumed she might have been dealing with some muscle soreness. Just a few months later, the pain returned, but Destini got checked out and cleared once again.
Then, on Aug. 3, 2020, Destini told her mom the pain moved to her back.
“She came downstairs, it was late at night and she was bent over, like she couldn’t barely move,” Lately said. “When I looked at her back, I was like, ‘It looks like a bump, a lump or something.”
When they scheduled the next visit, they went in needing answers. “I need you to run all the tests you can, all the blood work and see what’s going on with her,” Lately remembers asking doctors.
They brought back devastating results. After taking four weeks to be absolutely sure, Destini was diagnosed with clear cell sarcoma.
“I started looking it up and was already like, scared,” Lakisha said.
While specialists threw everything they could at the cancer, including chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, it spread aggressively and quickly through Destini’s body.
“She had her fifth, sixth and seventh rib, part of her rib removed on her left side,” Lakisha said. “It was terrible. I was feeling like I wish it would be me, not her. You’re not supposed to question but I still question, like, ‘why my daughter?’”
As a single mom, Lately had to leave her job in September to take Destini to a Sarcoma specialist in Cincinnati, sometimes for weeks at a time.
She never left her daughter’s side, despite being a single mom facing a heavy financial struggle with treatments while having three more kids to take care of. Lately even slept in the bed with Destini just so she could be there if her daughter was in need.
“It’s by the grace of God that I’m still standing and still inside my house right now,” she said.
Meanwhile, Destini’s body rejected the treatment making her vomit constantly. “She was miserable. That’s what she told me, “mommy, I’m miserable in the hospital.’”
After the hospital recommended hospice care, Lakisha turned to holistic treatments. After seeing her do an entire interview without shedding any tears, News 8’s Randall Newsome asked her a question: Where does her strength come from?
“Of course I have hope,” Lately said. “I have hope. I have faith. I just want her to just live as long as she can.”
Just a couple days after Lately spoke with News 8, Destini died. Lately says she’s now on a mission to raise awareness for sarcoma in honor of her daughter’s memory by getting involved in the fight to shed more light on this deadly but rare disease.
“[Even] if there’s only 200 people in the world that have it, I feel like there should be more research on it,” she said.