Single mom dying of rare disease raising money for her funeral

A single mother living in the US state of Utah, who was just given three months to live, is raising money for her own funeral after “silently battling a rare terminal cancer” for two years, reports People magazine.

Erika Diarte-Carr, 30, initially set a GoFundMe campaign goal of $5,000 to cover the cost of a future service, but more than 30,000 donors have since helped her raise $900,000 as of Sunday—with the rest of the donations intended to be put into a trust fund for her two children, Jeremiah, 7, and Aaliyah, 5.

She was initially diagnosed with the cancer on May 7, 2022, when she walked into an emergency room with what she thought was a "normal shoulder injury," per local outlet ABC4 and the description of the single mom's GoFundMe.

The doctor than proceeded to tell me that there were multiple tumors that had metastasized to other parts of my body including my skeletal, which is how we were able to find the tumor that was causing my shoulder pain," Erika wrote. "By that point the damage had already been done. In that moment, mine and my kids’ entire lives had changed forever, as well as all of those around us..

Less than two years later, on Jan. 17, 2024, Erika was diagnosed with Cushing's syndrome, which the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases describes as a disorder caused when one's body "makes too much of the hormone cortisol over a long period of time." Per the institute, only 40 to 70 people out of every 1 million have Cushing's.

"That's when I started to decline and things got worse," she told ABC4, adding that it caused the "majority" of her health issues including not being able to walk.

As the Utah mother explained on her GoFundMe, the diagnosis caused "so many other underlying issues" including rapid weight gain and swelling, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, "moon face," muscle and bone deterioration and more.

In an update on her campaign, citing an oncologist appointment on September 18, Erika wrote that she has since "decided to discontinue treatments as they will no longer help." She was given three months to live, she revealed.

"3 months to spend with my babies and loved ones. 3 months to make the best of what time I have left," she wrote. "During these next couple of months I need to make sure my kids will be ok after I am gone. I am faced now with the most difficult thing of planning my own funeral," she wrote.

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