When a 13-year-old boy began complaining to his mom about shoulder pain, she initially assumed it was “growing pain.”
However, when his condition then worsened, an X-ray put them on the path to a devastating diagnosis.
Ashley Williams, from Mayfield, Kentucky, told Newsweek that her son Dakarai began to complain about his shoulder in January 2024. An avid basketball player who had only recently turned 13, Williams said they “thought nothing about it” at the time and assumed it was “growing pain.”
However, by mid-March, things had gotten worse. “His shoulder had begun to look swollen and, a couple days later, he couldn’t even lift his right arm above his head,” Williams said.
Dakarai was taken to a doctor and underwent an X-ray and then MRI scan that confirmed the shocking news: the mass he had on his shoulder was a tumor.
A subsequent biopsy at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tennessee, then revealed the devastating extent of Dakarai’s condition: Stage IV osteosarcoma with metastasis to both lungs.
“When the doctor said it was Stage IV cancer and that it had already spread to both lungs, I felt like the air left my body,” Williams said. “I couldn’t process it. Just weeks before he was playing basketball, and now they were telling us this? I didn’t know what to think or feel.”
Scared and numb, Williams had just one question revolving around in her head: “how do I save my son?”
Dakarai started chemotherapy almost immediately. Within a few months, the doctors removed most of the cancer in his shoulder—including the entire humerus bone—and replaced it with a donor bone. Then Dakarai underwent radiation therapy.
Cancer impacts millions of families every year. In 2025, it is estimated that 2,041,910 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with the disease and that 618,120 will die from it, according to figures calculated by the National Cancer Institute.
Dakarai knows only too well the impact that cancer can have on a family. A year before his diagnosis, his stepmother, who had been part of his life since he was 2, was diagnosed with the disease.
“While he was going through radiation about three months ago, she lost her battle,” Williams said. “We were still trying to breathe through our own fight, and then we were hit with that loss, too. It shook all of us, especially Dakarai.”
He is now 15 months into his own struggle against cancer, and it is one that he is fighting bravely but with increasing difficulty.
“Nothing has stopped the cancer,” Williams said. “Not the chemo. Not the surgery. Not the radiation. It just keeps spreading. And, somehow, through it all, Dakarai still shows up every day and fights with a strength that humbles me.”
Williams continues to pray and hope that God can deliver something that Dakarai’s treatment has so far failed to do.
“My faith is the only thing that has held me through all of this. There have been nights I cried out to God asking why,” the mom said.
“But, even in the middle of all the pain and unanswered questions, I have never let go of God. He has carried us through moments I did not think we would survive. I have watched Him give Dakarai strength when everything in his body was breaking down. Faith does not make it easier, but it gives me something to hold onto.”
Williams has also found strength in sharing Dakarai’s journey to social media, posting to Facebook and sharing clips on her TikTok @ashleycardenaswilliams.
“TikTok became something different for me—a way to escape reality some nights when we were in the hospital,” Williams said. “While scrolling, I found myself watching a lot of stories similar to Dakarai’s, and I realized how powerful and healing it was to connect through those shared experiences.”
For now, Williams said that she has only one hope for the future: “more time.”
“More good days; more laughter; more memories that do not revolve around hospitals and medicine,” she added. “I am praying for something, anything, that might stop this cancer.
“But, even if that never comes, I am asking God for peace and strength to keep showing up for my son every day. And I hope Dakarai’s story keeps reminding people that, even in the darkest places, faith can still live.”
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