Marc Leishman and wife connect with sepsis survivor at Bay Hill

Every Monday afternoon, an alert popped up on Sophia Moores' laptop.

Get ready, it said. You’re playing golf in 30 minutes with Dad.

For more than a year, though, Sophia hasn’t been able to join, her father, Jon, who taught her the game. She’s been in and out of hospitals, battling sepsis, which is the body’s extreme and often life-threatening response to an infection, not once, but three times.

The first time the 14-year-old got sepsis, her heart stopped for eight minutes, triggering a desperate code blue. Her liver, kidneys and lungs were compromised, as well. She had a breathing tube and IVs stuck seemingly everywhere. She couldn’t eat for 33 days. The only way she could communicate was by writing on a white board.

“I have one picture where she just wrote the word sad, just S-A-D, and it's like in these huge capital letters,” Sophia’s mom, Mary, says. “And then probably several weeks later, she is writing a sentence, and she wrote, ‘Tell me what you got to eat. I promise I won't be jelly.’”

Sophia’s first meal – when she finally was able to eat -- was a blue raspberry popsicle.

“There's a picture of that where I'm just like bug-eyed,” Sophia recalls. “I'm just like, ahhh, with the blue stain on my lips.”

Two more bouts with sepsis followed that summer. While Sophia was being treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), a nurse told her mother about the Begin Again Foundation that aims to save lives through education about sepsis and toxic shock syndrome, as well as offer financial support to survivors and their families.

“And so, I got the information and looked it up,” Mary says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, it's a golfer. That's really interesting.’ We're big golf fans. And I remember calling Jon, ‘Do you know who this is?’”

Of course he knew of Marc Leishman, Jon told his wife, who worked at Hanover (Pa.) Country Club. So she applied for and received a Leishline grant – and the affable Australian pro also sent Sophia a video to encourage her in her recovery and rehabilitation.

Little did the Moores know, though, that this week, they would be in Orlando meeting Leishman and his wife, Audrey, who is a sepsis survivor like Sophia, at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard.

Audrey, who was given a 5% chance of survival when she contracted sepsis in addition to toxic shock syndrome in April 2015, says her “heart broke hearing their story.”

So, she came up with the idea of providing a VIP experience for the family at Bay Hill where Marc is a past champion. She contacted the PGA TOUR to set up a behind-the-scenes visit and talked with one of her husband’s sponsors, Hilton Grand Vacations, to arrange lodging.

On Wednesday after visits to the TV compound, ShotLink truck, media center and merchandise tent, Marc will give Sophia a golf lesson. Sophia, who played in PGA Junior League events before she became ill last year, planned to bring her putter and sand wedge to Orlando. She’s not strong enough to swing any other clubs right now.

“To have sepsis three times in one year as a little girl it's got to be hard on her in so many ways,” Marc says. “And if we can just make her forget about it for a few days, or a week, and make things easier for her … hopefully, this will be pretty special.

“We’re excited to be able to help in a small way.”

The odds were stacked against Sophia even before she had three debilitating bouts with sepsis. She has Kostmann’s syndrome, which is am extremely rare disease of the bone marrow where children lack neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that helps fight infections.

Sophia was diagnosed at 4 weeks old. At first, the doctors thought she had pneumonia, but further tests revealed the congenital neutropenia.

Daily shots helped her live a somewhat normal life that included golf and running 5 miles a day in hopes of making the cross-country team. Sophia even came to administer the medicine herself, although recently a higher dose and volume prompted doctors to install a catheter in her arm.

On Jan. 30, 2021, after several visits to her pediatrician, Sophia was admitted to Hershey Children’s Hospital with what her parents thought was a stomach virus. Doctors were able to get several liters of fluid into Sophia and she seemed to be doing better.

Mary wasn’t feeling well, so Jon stayed with their daughter that night. They started watching the movie, “Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs,” an animated science fiction comedy. Sophia seemed to be nodding off as her dad held her hand.

“You’re falling asleep,” Jon remembers telling her but Sophia didn’t respond. He asked again, “Are you tired, Sophia?” Still no response. Finally, he shook her to try to wake her up.

A nurse who was putting notes in a computer nearby quickly made the code blue call and within 20 seconds, the room was full of medical personnel. Eight minutes later, they had revived Sophia. The cardiac arrest was brought on by sepsis.

“It's the scariest thing that ever happened to me,” Jon says.

Nineteen days later, Sophia had emergency surgery to repair a perforated bowel. Doctors eventually created an ostomy to help her intestines heal but there were complications, and she wasn’t released until May 19.

Sepsis infections in late July and again in August, the last requiring a stay that lasted until mid-October, necessitated helicopter flights to CHOP. Sophia watched so many movies on the Disney channel that at one point there were no new ones to see. She created a cheat sheet so she could watch all the Marvel movies in order.

Sophia, who is a big fan of Lexi Thompson after meeting her at the 2015 U.S. Women’s Open, kept in touch with her friends in the PGA Junior Golf League, and at her coach’s request, she suggested the team’s name, a play on her own, “Moore Together.” Since January, she’s been able to attend school part-time, and she can tell she’s getting stronger. She even did a project for her science class on genetic mutations like neutropenia.

“I think part of my lowest point was not being able to walk, to drink, to eat, to even breathe on my own,” Sophia says. “Knowing that I came from that, it's a little breath of fresh air that even though there's still a journey ahead of me, I've gone through that.

“I can do anything.”

In short, she’s a fighter. “You can say that again,” her father says.

Audrey Leishman has the same kind of fighting spirit.

She actually thought she had the flu when she finally consented to go to an urgent care facility that March evening in 2015. The doctor convinced her to go – by ambulance -- to a Virginia Beach hospital where she was diagnosed with sepsis, toxic shock syndrome and acute respiratory distress. Her condition rapidly deteriorated and the couple said their goodbyes.

“Audrey was basically on death's door,” Marc says. “And we got told in uncertain terms that she wasn't going to survive. But she survived and now she's living pretty much a completely normal life. She still has a few issues here and there, but for the most part, it's a very normal life.”

The Begin Again Foundation was part of Audrey’s healing process. The couple had two sons at the time, Harvey and Ollie, and have since added a daughter, Eva. Audrey was still very sick, and she says it would have been very easy to have just laid in bed while the boys were at preschool.

By April, though, the groundwork was being laid for the Begin Again Foundation and Audrey had a mission. Prior to meeting Marc in 2007 at a café in Williamsburg, Virginia, when he was trying to qualify for an event on what is now known as the Korn Ferry Tour, she had worked with mentally ill and developmentally disabled adults, as well as a disability analyst.

“And when I stopped working, when I married Marc, there was a very, very large void in my life,” Audrey says. “Having kids helped, but I didn't feel whole and complete again until we started Begin Again.

“And it has given me more purpose in this life than I could have really ever hoped for. And honestly, it's made me love golf even more because I know that we wouldn't have this platform and the ability to help as many people as we do without golf.”

The Begin Again Foundation has now aided more than 400 survivors and distributed more than $1 million. Marc was able to donate the $50,000 he won in the RSM Birdies Fore Love competition last fall to the foundation to help further its mission, as well.

The Leishline grants, like the one the Moore family received, are important. But so is getting the word out about the warning signs of sepsis – fever, difficulty breathing, confusion, rapid heart rate and extreme pain and discomfort. Four people have actually reached out and told the organization they sought treatment because they saw those symptoms – including a tutor at the school attended by the Leishmans’ sons.

“I have gotten to the point where I actually see my illness and almost dying as a blessing,” Audrey says. “It sounds strange even … when I hear myself say it, but when I look at how much good has come from it, there's no way that I could wish it didn't happen.”

At the same time, Audrey says she has learned to compartmentalize what happened to her when she had sepsis. Otherwise, she says, she doesn’t think she’d be able to function as she interacted with other survivors and their families.

What Sophia went through, though, stirred up memories.

“But there are definitely those stories that do get to you,” she says. “And anytime it's a child that always hits me a little bit harder because I am a mom and the thought of my child ever going through what I went through is probably my worst nightmare.

“So, Sophia's is definitely a story that has stuck with us. And that's why doing this experience with them means so much to really everyone involved.”