Melody Morgan is a 44-year-old seamstress and single mom to an 11-year-old son in Western Tennessee. In 2026, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and began sharing her story on TikTok. As colon cancer rates continue to skyrocket among young people, Morgan spoke with Newsweek about what she wants people to learn from her experience, and how her faith and family have helped her through it all.
Gracious. This is a thing that I say when I’m overwhelmed or upset or scared or in awe of God’s kindness to me, in the way that He uses my circumstance—in this case stage 4 colon cancer—for my good and for His glory.
The first night in the emergency room was a blur, and one of those nights where you experience the full spectrum of emotions. I thought I was going in to get some IV fluids for a pesky stomach bug that wouldn’t go away. A friend had to practically drag me there, because I don’t have time to go to the ER. Who does? She sat with me while I got the IVs and we thought, “We’ll be out of here in a couple of hours, feeling better!”
She sat with me while they did some bloodwork, which I was hesitant to do, because I don’t have health insurance. She sat with me while a doctor said, “There’s something bigger going on here. We need to do an abdominal CAT scan.” They did it, and that’s when they saw the mass in my colon and a mass in my liver. I was dehydrated and anemic; I had all these problems I had been pushing through. Problems that I had just chalked up to “middle age” and “being tired,” because who isn’t? My friend sat with me as we MarcoPolo’d her husband to keep him updated—at the beginning of the evening it was all laughter and hot goss. By the end it was tears and, “I might have cancer.”
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They gave me a blood transfusion right away and kept me in the hospital for three days. It was zero to 60, right there. It was a shock. It was three days of letting my church know, letting my small group know, feeling God’s comfort, and knowing people were praying for me and caring for my family in tangible ways. Church members and family members brought me food and watched my son and…loved me…in ways that my pride previously would not have allowed. It was three days of rolling around in the gradations of “I might be fine” to “I might die, and what will happen to my son?”
I had to put my “God is sovereign” money where my mouth was.
A colonoscopy confirmed I had cancer. Later the doctor scheduled a liver biopsy to confirm that the mass in my liver was indeed metastasized cancer. I was shocked. I’m very active and I’ve always been healthy. Looking back, I can see that I had some symptoms, but they were all things that were easy to brush off as something minor. Now, in hindsight, I see that I ignored a lot of things. But they didn’t interfere with my day-to-day life. I believed what I wanted to believe, because when you’re a self-employed single mother, you’re never “off the clock.”
Colon cancer is the cancer of the young; more young people are getting colon cancer and dying from it, and the reason is they are ignoring their symptoms. Caught early, colon cancer is one of the easiest cancers to treat. That’s one of the reasons I started talking about this on TikTok. I’m looking at the possibility that I could die. Had I gone in for a colonoscopy even six months before I did, I could have caught my cancer at stage 2 or stage 3, which is much easier to treat, and also doesn’t have the long-term consequences of stage 4 cancer.
The No. 1 symptom I ignored (which is horrifying to write about in Newsweek—gracious!) was blood in my stool. It’s easy to say, “Oh, it’s hemorrhoids, or oh, it was something I ate.” I’ve been telling people, “You should not be actively bleeding. If you see blood in your stool, go to the doctor.” For me, I would be sitting on the toilet and there would be blood in my stool, and I would look it up on my phone: “What causes blood in the stool?” And the internet would tell me, “Either you have colon cancer or you have hemorrhoids." I didn’t want to have colon cancer. So I would tell myself, “Oh, it’s hemorrhoids,” and I would get on with my day. And I think a lot of people do that.
Gracious.
Another symptom I had was abdominal pain, but it wasn’t bad. I just thought, “Oh, my stomach hurts from time to time in that same spot.” Fatigue is another symptom, but that one’s also difficult because everybody’s tired, everybody works hard. The last symptom I had was unexplained weight loss. I, like most American women, have been trying to lose weight and over the past year, it was really easy to do so. I thought, “Well, look at me, I’m doing super.” Now I see that losing weight shouldn’t have been so easy.
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Looking back at all these things together, I think, “Gracious, how did I miss all this?” But I know how I missed it: I was busy. This diagnosis has helped me slow down a little bit (OK, a lot…I’m fighting cancer) and appreciate my son, my friends, my family and my church. I was talking with my sister recently and said, “If I die today, what would my son remember about me? It would be, ‘My mom worked, my mom was out in the garden, my mom was busy, busy, busy.’” And I thought, I need to sit down and play Uno with him. I need to focus more of my attention on him. In a way, this diagnosis has given me a restart.
How can a person learn to be grateful for a cancer diagnosis? It’s hard, but only possible because of the Lord.
My church family has blessed me so much. They have brought meals, they have mowed my grass—you name it, they’ve done it. It’s humbling to look outside and see a random kid mowing your lawn and look upstairs and have a random church lady scrubbing your bathroom. I’m grateful. And receiving that love and care from my church family is also a gift that I wouldn’t have had if I didn’t have cancer. Having cancer has changed me mentally and emotionally, and it’s helped me to be kinder and gentler toward people. And I’m grateful for the common grace of medication, and doctors who know things.
So far, I’ve done six rounds of chemotherapy. The goal was to try to shrink the softball-sized tumor on my liver enough for surgery, then do another round of chemotherapy to make sure the cancer is gone. I started off strong, but with these last two treatments, I’ve been really sick. My doctor said, “You know what? The cancer is being killed by the chemo, but the chemo is also killing you, so we’re going to take a break.” So, I have the month of October off from treatment, and then I’ll do a PET scan to see if I’m ready for surgery. The surgery would remove the tumor from my liver as well as the top part of my colon, where the other tumor is located.
My son has been a great motivator. Chemo is brutal, and the thought of this major surgery is terrifying, but my son is 11 and I’m not done raising him and that has been a motivator to get up and fight. Sitting down and explaining to him, “Mom has cancer,” is one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. And I’ve done some tough things. An 11-year-old doesn’t understand everything, but they understand the big, heavy words. He formed this idea in his brain that if I die, life will simply go on like normal for him. “I’ll live in this house all by myself and mow the grass and take care of the dogs and make the spaghetti.” One day he said, “Mom, you need to tell me how to write a check.” And I said, “Gracious, what do you need to write a check for?” And he said, “So if you die, I can pay the bills.” That’s the gut-wrenching, hard part. But there’s also something sweet about seeing my son lean into, “I’m going to be OK, too.” He’s a tough kid and I love him so much. I want to be here for him.
I’m grateful that God is using my cancer to encourage others. Even in suffering, I want to be faithful, and be salt and light to the people in my life. Only a good God could take something like cancer, which is evidence of sin and death in the world, and use it for good.
I’m typically a very positive, cheerful person, but my attitude toward this diagnosis is a reflection of my faith. My good. His glory. I very strongly believe that God is in control, and because of that I can rest and have peace, even with cancer.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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