Watch: Teen Mom Alums Taylor Selfridge, Cory Wharton’s 3-Year-Old Daughter Hospitalized
MTV star Cory Wharton has played with literal fire and even ran a grueling final with a torn ACL. But no, uh, Challenge has compared to watching his 3-year-old daughter Maya endure yet another lengthy hospital stay.
“It was a nightmare,” The Challenge regular recounted in an exclusive interview with E! News. Though Maya has logged a number of days in a hospital bed—her rare congenital heart defect requiring multiple open-heart surgeries—”We didn’t see this coming,” Wharton explained. “This was out of the blue.”
In fact, while Taylor Selfridge, also mom to their 6-year-old daughter Mila, was with the girls, “I was actually filming a project out in Thailand,” Wharton shared. “And it took me 32 hours just to fly to see her. The first time seeing her in five weeks, she was on a ventilator. So it was just surreal.”
A month after their three-week stay in a Dallas hospital, “There’s still a lot of questions on why she formed plastic bronchitis,” noted Wharton, who shares Ryder, 9, with Teen Mom star Cheyenne Floyd, “and how these casts were growing in her lungs. And it’s scary because there’s not a definite answer right now.”
What they do know for sure, he said, is “we have all her numbers stable. She’s looking good. The pressures in her heart are great.”
And as they try to determine how exactly she developed the casts on her lungs that blocked her airways, shared Wharton, safe to say all eyes will be on their soon-to-be 4-year-old.
“It’s so scary because they’re like, ‘Well, is she turning purple? Is she about to pass out?'” he recounted of the advice they received from doctors. “I’m like, I don’t want to have to stare at my child, to wait for her to turn purple in order to figure out what’s going on.”
Cory Wharton/Instagram
Still, they’ve all been breathing a bit easier since Maya was discharged.
“The minute we left the hospital, she instantly, like, started improving at a rapid rate,” Wharton recounted. Up until that point, she had barely said a word during the entire stay, he continued, “You’ve kind of been scaring us. But then the minute we leave, she’s being her goofy self and saying the words she normally would say.”
Since then they’ve definitely adopted a one-day-at-a-time approach. But, he shared, “She’s at home right now living her best life.”
And she’s not the only one.
“Trauma bonding—it is a real thing,” Wharton, 35, acknowledged. Though he and Selfridge hadn’t been in the best place as a couple leading up to the hospital stay, he said that changed after “three weeks of being together, nonstop, going through that situation, just knowing that we both want what’s best for Maya and just dealing with that.”
With Maya on a ventilator for five days, “the whole time, you’re just kind of keeping her asleep, almost like a seduced coma,” he explained. “Me and Taylor, we got to have talks that we normally wouldn’t have.”
The gist of their conversations, he continued, “was like, ‘OK, the little things that we used to worry about, all that stuff, let’s push that to the side. We know what we want. We want this family to work. We want to be there for our girls.”
While it’d be hard to find the silver lining in every parent’s worst nightmare, noted Wharton, “If there was ever, like, a little diamond in the rough or blessing in disguise, it would be that, that me and Taylor did reconnect, and we did decide that, okay, we both have to put time into each other as well.”
Because, yes, the terrifying experience did serve as a reminder of just how short life can be.
“It changed my perspective on a lot of things,” Wharton acknowledged. “Those little things that you tend to stress about in life kind of went away. It was like, those things don’t matter in the grand scheme, right?”
What does is getting to spend some time in the happiest place on Earth.
“I want to make sure that my girls get to live the best life that they can,” Wharton stressed. “Like, ‘Let’s go outside. Let’s go to the park, let’s be active.'”
And let’s definitely not cancel a planned trip to Disneyland for Mila’s April birthday. Checking with Maya’s doctor to ensure she’d be up for it, “He was like, ‘Take her to Disney, bring her on the rides,'” shared Wharton. “What are we going to do, keep her in a bubble?”
Taylor Selfridge/Instagram
Wharton has been making some magic for himself as well, also saying yes to an opportunity to train with the United States’ men’s and women’s rugby teams.
Invited by the team at Quest Nutrition to join the scrum in San Diego earlier this month, “I respect those athletes so much that it was an opportunity I just didn’t want to pass,” Wharton explained. And though he’s the type to go hard in training—”If I’m not the person that’s sweating the most in the gym, I feel like I’m failing”—learning how to kick a rugby ball was humbling, admitted the former college football player. “But it was a good time to get out there and run around and meet the Olympians.”
He also got to stock up on the brand’s new releases for his girls. In addition to their layered Stacks Bars, “They have this new protein shake that I’m definitely gonna try to mix that into a smoothie or something for them,” he detailed of their Salted Caramel Protein Shake. “The only way to get my kids some fruit or vegetables is to hide it in a smoothie.”
Courtesy of Quest
He plans to sneak a little fun into their summer as well.
In addition to an outing to Los Angeles’ Catalina Island and a return trip to Disneyland for Maya’s 4th birthday June 1, “I’m trying to book a summer trip for all my girls to go somewhere,” shared Wharton. “Taylor already told me we’re not going anywhere far. I was like, dang, I want to go somewhere far.”
On his maybe someday bucket list, “I want to go to Africa, do the safaris, and go to Egypt,” he shared. Enduring—and surviving—his worst case scenario, “kind of kickstarted me,” added Wharton of making all the plans. “Definitely just take it every day and not taking it for granted and just living our best life.”
Of course, he’s not alone in that. Check out how other Teen Mom stars have fared with their romantic relationships.
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