GREEN RIVER — On Oct. 4, 2018, Charli Morgan was supposed to be at an Ozzy Osbourne concert. Instead, two days later, she was being airlifted to Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, so close to death that doctors told her family one more day without treatment would have killed her.
“I was crawling on the floor. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t walk,” Morgan, 64, said of that night. She tried to convince her husband, Owen Morgan, to wheel her into the show anyway.
“I said, ‘I don’t care. Just put me in a wheelchair. I’ll die at Ozzy.'”
She didn’t make it to the concert. But she made it through something far more harrowing.
Morgan was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a FLT3 mutation, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer that carries a survival rate of 20% or less for patients her age. In the nearly seven years since, she has endured a bone marrow transplant, two relapses, kidney failure, heart failure, liver failure, sepsis, a heart attack and at least two moments when doctors told her family to say their goodbyes.
On May 12, she will take the stage at Huntsman Cancer Institute to share her story at a blood cancer awareness event titled “Living Well with Blood Cancer: Support, Science and Stories.”
“Not everybody gets to live,” Morgan said. “I have a story to tell.”
A New Birthday
Morgan received a bone marrow transplant on July 9, 2019, a date she now calls her “new birthday.” Her half-sister in North Carolina, a 5-of-10 marrow match with no antibodies, was her donor. Doctors administered an intense course of chemotherapy and radiation before the procedure to prepare her body to receive the new cells.
“My DNA has disappeared. It no longer exists,” she said.
Recovery was relentless. She had to stay within 20 minutes of Huntsman for 100 days, living in a Bountiful Airbnb with her husband. She suffered two relapses requiring booster infusions of her donor’s stored cells. She was hospitalized during the 2020 Salt Lake City earthquake and repeatedly through the COVID-19 pandemic. In August 2020, her doctors told her there was nothing more they could do and sent her home to count her days.
Feed the Machine
Morgan went home to Green River. She laid on the couch. Then she got up.
She cooked one egg. She walked her chihuahua Choco to the corner and back. She ate even when everything tasted like cardboard. Every morning she repeated a phrase to herself:
Feed The Machine
“Feed the machine, if it’s your mind, body, or soul,” she said. “You don’t want to do it. You don’t feel like doing it. You’d rather lay there because you’re miserable. But if you’ve got the will to live, you’re going to feed the machine.”
It is the message she plans to deliver at Huntsman on May 12, along with an account of faith. During one of her lowest moments in the ICU, a hospital chaplain asked what she needed. She asked him to pray. Within an hour, she said, her condition began stabilizing in ways her care team described as a miracle.
Still Fighting
Morgan hit the five-year post-transplant milestone in July 2025. Her oncologist told her she could consider herself in full remission, a threshold that took on added meaning given how many times she had been told she would not survive. But her medical life continues with monthly blood work, twice-yearly cancer screenings and ongoing treatment for dangerously elevated iron levels caused by years of transfusions.
She said she hopes her story reaches others in Sweetwater County, where she believes the cancer rate is unusually high.
“Almost my whole street has had cancer,” she said.
For anyone fighting the disease or watching a loved one fight it, her advice has not changed.
“Get up. Put some food in you. Move. Say your prayers,” she said. “Only you can do it. Nobody else is going to pump you up.”
The blood cancer seminar at Huntsman Cancer Institute is May 12. Huntsman Sports Fest, a fun run benefiting leukemia research, is June 13 in Salt Lake City.
