She got her coronavirus miracle, surviving 3 weeks in a coma. Then came the hard part.

When Karla Taylor-Bauman went home after 54 days in hospitals, including 21 days on a ventilator in an induced coma, she called her survival from coronavirus a miracle.

But miracles don’t come easy, the Lake Villa woman has found.

Four months later, she isn’t fully back to normal. She tires easily, can’t climb more than a handful of stairs and, still needing continued care, hasn’t been able to go back to her job as a financial adviser.

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Having been so sick — after she got out, her doctor, Dennis McCreary, described her condition as having been “as close to brain dead as you get without being brain dead” — she knew recovery would take time.

What surprised her were the medical bills. They began to arrive about a month after Taylor-Bauman, 50, was released from the hospital at the end of May. She and her husband Jevon Bauman say they amounted to about $240,000, mostly from the hospital, Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan, despite having health insurance.

Then, after a Chicago Sun-Times reporter asked the hospital about the tab for her care, Taylor-Bauman got a call from Vista with some surprising and happy news.

“I thought maybe they were going to say they will work with me and set up a payment plan,” she says.

Instead, she was told her balance owed was now zero.

“I just started crying because I really was not expecting that,” she says.

Taylor-Bauman says she found out from a hospital representative and her insurance company that some of the bills were sent to her in error or already had been covered by her insurance.

Stephanie Vera, Vista’s marketing manager, confirms that: “This patient has no outstanding balance with our hospital for the cost of her treatment. Her hospital charges were covered by her insurance provider per the terms of our agreement with them.”

The same is true for her stay at Kindred Hospital Central, a rehabilitation facility. “I can confirm that her bills were paid with Kindred,” says Al Wazwaz, chief executive officer of Kindred Hospital Chicago Central.

It would be nice if that were the happy ending to Taylor-Bauman’s COVID-19 saga. It’s not. Her battle to regain her health after her miracle isn’t over. Nor are her financial problems.

She and her husband try to keep it all in perspective.

After all, the coronavirus nearly killed her, quickly overwhelming her body.

It started with sniffles. Those rapidly progressed to a hacking cough and having to fight to take each breath into her lungs.

She got to Vista Medical on April 2. Within two hours, she was put on a ventilator, placed in a drug-induced coma. Her kidneys stopped working. Her heartbeat was erratic. Prepare for the worst, doctors told her husband.

“When Karla was hospitalized — especially the first two or three weeks — here I am, basically with my wife’s death staring me in the face,” Jevon Bauman says.

He couldn’t be at her bedside because, after all, it was the coronavirus, and safety protocols wouldn’t allow that, not even on her birthday.

As her health deteriorated, he could speak with her only occasionally via an iPad that circulated on his wife’s hospital floor.

Then, she pulled through. News cameras captured the moment when an ambulance brought her home to her family and friends. Her husband rushed over to hug his “best friend.”

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

But Taylor-Bauman couldn’t remain at home. For now, she’s staying in the rectory of the North Chicago church where her father is the pastor because she requires daily care that her husband, who needs to keep working, can’t provide. Because she still tires easily, she rarely strays far from the adjustable hospital bed that takes up a large part of the first-floor living room — close enough to take in the aroma that drifts in from her mother’s Jamaican beef stew bubbling on the kitchen stove.

“My parents, God bless them, have basically been at my beck and call for literally the last three months,” she says.

She hopes eventually to move back home — if she still has a home.

The Baumans had fallen behind on their mortgage payments even before she got sick and are now facing foreclosure on their home of five years. They recently got a notice from the Lake County sheriff’s office that their home is set to be sold in a foreclosure auction Nov. 10.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times

Jevon Bauman says they got behind on their $1,871-a-month mortgage when he lost his sales job late last year. He’s working again, as a salesman, but at a much lower salary, he says. And she has been out of work since she got sick.

Jevon Bauman says he’s tried to negotiate with First National Bank of America, the mortgage-holder, but that it hasn’t been willing to modify the loan.

In emails to the bank’s credit services department, Jevon Bauman describes his wife nearly dying and asks for “a bit of compassion.”

The response: “I am ... sorry to hear of the recent difficulties you are experiencing. ... The delinquency of your account began months before the outbreak of Covid-19 and we are unable to offer you any modification.”

According to their June billing statement, they owed about $30,000 in past-due payments and fees.

Jevon Bauman says their problems with the bank began a couple of years ago, when he says a lawyer advised him to stop making mortgage payments to try to negotiate a lower interest rate. He says they faced foreclosure at that time that ultimately he reached an agreement with the bank to halt.

Efforts to reach a First National spokesman were unsuccessful.

Provided

The federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security — CARES — Act protects homeowners with federally backed mortgages from foreclosures through December. The law also allows homeowners dealing with coronavirus-related financial hardship to delay mortgage payments for up to one year without having to pay fees or penalties.

The Baumans say the law doesn’t apply to their mortgage because it’s not federally backed.

“I’m just praying for God to do whatever it is he needs to do in my life,” Taylor-Bauman says, still struggling at times to breathe.

She’s happy, though, for having the time with her mother, who recently was in the hospital for heart surgery.

“I find joy in having her fussing over me like if I was a little girl again,” Taylor-Bauman says.

One recent morning, she summoned enough strength to surprise her parents with breakfast: her Guatemalan grandmother’s huevos rancheros, fried plantains and black beans.

“It just made her day,” Taylor-Bauman says.

Ashlee Rezin Garcia / Sun-Times