Watch: MTV’s Cory Wharton Shares His Biggest Wish for Daughter Maya’s Health
Cory Wharton is hoping that toughness, uh, runs in the family.
Because after years of watching his 4-year-old daughter Maya literally fight for her life due to complications stemming from her rare congenital heart defect, he knows he can’t sprint away from any challenge.
So when The Children’s Heart Foundation asked if he’d be willing to take on his most grueling final yet, the Nov. 1 TCS New York City Marathon, “I said yes,” The Challenge star detailed in an exclusive interview with E! News. Despite having never run more than an hour without stopping, he’s aiming to gut it out for a few more on the 26.2-mile course designed and put on by the New York Road Runners.
“I’m just happy that I get the chance to run and be a part of this and feel the energy of the crowd,” he explained, “and for it to be for a good cause just gives me that much more motivation to get it under five.”
And should he be tempted to stop while winding through the city’s five boroughs, he need only think of his strong AF preschooler.
As the 35-year-old, who’s raised upwards of $11,000 to date, put it, “It’s just giving me all the motivation that I need.”
And, yes, the dad of three (he shares Maya and Mila, 6, with ex Taylor Selfridge, as well as Ryder, 9, with Cheyenne Floyd) anticipates sobbing once he crosses that finish line.
“Of course I’m going to cry then—I’m going to cry for so many reasons,” he detailed. “I can’t wait to FaceTime the girls after finishing and just, ‘Look at Daddy’s medal.'”
But before he toes the line, he’s hoping to collect something even more valuable.
“She actually has another surgery,” he revealed of Maya’s Oct. 22 cath procedure, “that we’re all praying for that it goes well.”
Best-case scenario, noted Wharton, it will be a one-night stay, assuming her stats stay strong.
Cory Wharton/Instagram
Though, as he and Selfridge are painfully aware, life with tricuspid atresia can be unpredictable.
With Maya’s previous open-heart procedures, “it’s planned,” he noted. “You go in, you know the date, you know the time.”
And though enduring the recovery afterward has required quite a bit of heart, it was nothing compared to the call he received while filming the current season of The Challenge.
As Maya was airlifted to a Texas hospital, Wharton caught the first flight out of Thailand. “The moment I saw my daughter for the first time in six weeks, she was on a ventilator,” he recounted. “So it was just surreal. From going to shooting a reality TV show in Thailand, thinking everything’s OK at home, to going straight into a children’s hospital ICU unit for three weeks and sitting down with doctors, and them basically saying that they didn’t really know what was going on.”
Seeing the professionals flummoxed was admittedly terrifying. “When you see the confusion within the doctors, you get a little bit more worried,” said Wharton. Though eventually they discovered “she basically grew these casts in her lungs that closed her left lung. That was the scariest time of my life.”
But these days they’re all breathing a bit easier.
“We opened that lung back up, she’s on her meds,” Wharton detailed. “And we’ll continue to fight.”
At the moment, though, Maya’s life is more treats than tricks.
Though, “she’s excited for me to run—she gets excited when I go in the back and I’m working out,” acknowledged Wharton, “I don’t know if she fully understands. She’s just worried about what candy she’s gonna get trick-or-treating.”
Though, of course, he’s eyeing sometimes a bit sweeter than any Halloween candy.
“My biggest hope for Maya moving forward is that hopefully her heart is fine until she’s an adult,” he explained. While she’ll need to undergo yet another surgery in her 30s, he noted, “Let’s just pray there’s no more scares.”
Because, if he’s being honest, the trauma from Maya’s last hospitalization still lingers.
Cory Wharton/Instagram
“I cry sometimes from the PTSD,” Wharton admitted. Meaning he’s certain he’ll tear up as his little girl is taken into her cath procedure: “Seeing her go back, getting wheeled into the surgery room, and you have to be there with her, you want to be there, and you just kind of see her light turn off when they start giving her the anesthesia.”
And yet he’ll continue to swallow even the toughest medicine.
“It’s scary as a parent,” Wharton acknowledged. “But you always tell yourself, you’re not the one that it’s happening to. So I need to be strong for Maya. I need to be strong for Taylor and for everybody.”
Then, he needs to be strong for himself.
Carrying Maya and his inspiration to raise funds and awareness for the Children’s Heart Foundation through every step, said Wharton, he’s psyched “to feel the energy, to feel the emotion on race day.”
And afterward, he gets to join this group of celebs who call themselves marathoners.
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Bryan Bedder/New York Road Runners via Getty Images
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