Support Christopher Leslie's Long Road to Recovery

I’m the mother of Christopher Leslie. On the evening of December 12, 2024, Chris called me from his apartment in Sioux Falls to tell me he’d been sick for a month and needed help. I didn’t know at that time how serious it was. I made my drive from Brookings to his place in Sioux Falls to find him gasping for air and going blue.

I called 911 and he was rushed to the ER to find his oxygen percentage in the 60s and his heart rate in the 170s. After X-rays and CT scans, they discovered Chris had severe pneumonia that had been ongoing throughout that month. He almost died.

His right lung had two abscesses in the lower and middle lobe. The one in the lower lobe had burst and made a hole in his lung. He was septic and all the gunk was in his lungs and in the plural cavity around his right lung.

They admitted him to the ICU where he was put on a ventilator and feeding tube, and had a tube placed through his right chest into the plural cavity to drain the infectious fluid.

His healing has been up and down in the past twelve days in ICU. He has been taken off the respirator as of Thursday December 19th. He’s still on oxygen and they keep lowering and raising that while his lungs heal until they are able to use air from the room. One day the machine is at 30% oxygen and the next day it’s back up to 100%. He still has his plural tube in and doctor’s current goal is to get that out. They have been doing X-rays every day and are going to do at least an ultrasound tomorrow. I think they need to do another CT scan as well to see if the hole in his lung is healing.

A lot of plans for him are unknown at the moment because it’s taking him a long time to heal since he was so sick. He may not have surgery or he may. It’s too early to tell.

What we do know is that he’s going to be in the hospital for a while yet and after that he’s going to have lots of physical therapy to do basic things again. One nurse told me for every day in ICU, expect a week of physical therapy. He tried for the first time today to get into the chair “by himself” and it was very difficult. This was with medical staff using a belt around him to lift him and help him. He has a lot of muscle loss as he isn’t able to eat much at a time yet. Tonight they had to use the lift from the ceiling to get him back into his bed.

There are several detailed medical issues involved with his healing that I’m not going to go into now.

In addition to huge medical bills, he’s going to have other bills to pay just to live throughout this process. Such as rent, electricity, phone, internet (so he can pay some of his bills online, etc), car insurance, health insurance, groceries, etc.

I have been unable to start a fundraiser up to this point because of other things I’ve been dealing with such as car problems and our dog dying.

I’m asking for any amount of help that any of you can give to get Chris through this. We are going to have GoFundMe direct deposit into his bank. He will receive all but 2.9% and 30 cents per donation, which go to GoFundMe. GoFundMe said to put a first goal of $10,000 down although we expect his bills to be much greater than this.

He has bills coming up soon that will need to be paid and is incapacitated. I will write out his checks on behalf of him and have him sign them the best he can.

Thank you for all who are willing to help! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy (whatever holiday you celebrate ), and God bless you!