Help Autumn with her medical expenses
Autumn Nugent is a 32 year old mom of three who suffered from COVID-19 and severe sepsis, which resulted in weeks in Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, TN on life support, going completely deaf, and eventually having her hands and feet amputated. She is strong, resilient, and picking up the pieces of her life now. We are asking for help with her medical bills so she can focus on healing and not the stress of how she will pay her medical bills. Autumn’s medical expenses are over $200,000 and we are asking for help to raise 10% of the total cost.
Here is how it all happened:
On January 27, 2021, Autumn had surgery to remove a benign tumor from her arm. Several months later on Easter Sunday 2021, Autumn was throwing a football with her 2 sons when she heard a crack in her bone. Autumn once again had to get surgery, placing hardware in her arm. Following that second surgery, Autumn began to have difficulty breathing. By the time she made it to Vanderbilt, she was full-on septic shock and completely unconscious. It was a perfect storm of a COVID viral infection attacking her lungs plus bacteria invading the surgical wound in her arm. Both of these problems caused her blood to get too thick and what happened to Autumn was that not only her veins clotted off, but even the arteries of her arms and legs. It was devastating because her arms and legs began to die, and Autumn’s kidneys, lungs, heart and brain all failed. The ICU team at Vanderbilt put her on COVID meds and antibiotics plus a ventilator, dialysis, and adrenaline-like medicines to treat her viral and bacterial sepsis, shock, and multi-organ failure. We spent long hours outside the glass crying and thinking her children would lose their mom. Nurses spent long hours changing the wound dressings on her arms and legs, which were essentially like major burn injuries with the skin sloughing off, increasing her risk of even more infections. The doctors and nurses and a huge team spent all day and night trying to save her life, and Autumn proved her strength. She began to get better after weeks of illness. But then she went totally deaf, and couldn't even hear a single, "We love you, Autumn." This is another weird complication of COVID that we hadn't even heard of until it happened to Autumn. Over several months Autumn started to improve, coming off the ventilator and dialysis. Unfortunately, Autumn’s arms and legs went without blood flow for too long that she had to undergo amputations of her arms and legs on June 11th. Autumn was discharged from the hospital on June 25th to a rehab facility where she exceeded expectations and then went home on July 9th. As we said above, Autumn is a mother of three young kids and now has to adjust to life as a quadruple amputee (they call her a "quad").
Would you consider helping Autumn by making a selfless donation that she will use to pay her medical bills? She has a long road to recovery and re-entry into life, and the kids already want so much of her. Autumn will need ongoing surgeries, physical and occupational therapy, mental wellness counseling, and ongoing home-health nurse visits to deal with all these adjustments in her life. This financial hardship can be very stressful and Autumn is already facing emotional trauma. Anything that you can give will be greatly appreciated.
https://twitter.com/weselymd/status/1426111637380009986?s=21
