After more than a week in the hospital and spending days in a medically induced coma to combat sepsis, Virginia Beach resident Audrey Leishman remembers the discharge nurse coming into her room.
The nurse told Leishman she would need a central catheter line in her arm for ten days, antibiotics, a walker, a bedside commode, a shower chair and at-home physical therapy. She told Leishman how much it would cost — sepsis hospitalizations are some of the most expensive cases to treat in the United States.
“At the end of it, she says, ‘Is that okay’?” Leishman recalled. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well, what if it wasn’t okay? Like, what if I didn’t have the money for this, because I can’t go home without these things?’”…