A Doctor’s Diary: Encountering Chaos And Kindness In An Ebola Ward
Original article from: NPR posted on October 26, 2014. By Nahid Bhadelia
I am an infectious disease (ID) physician at Boston Medical Center, and I serve as the Director of Infection Control at National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, helping design medical response programs to potential exposures to viruses that cause viral hemorrhagic fevers. This summer I spent 12 days in Sierra Leone, serving as part of a team treating patients at Kenema Government Hospital’s Ebola treatment center. The center was supported by the World Health Organization with guidance, logistics and clinicians. My colleagues and I were recruited through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, a network that WHO hosts. I traveled with Dr. George Risi, a fellow ID doc, and Kate Hurley, RN, MSN, from St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula, which provides medical backup to Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
My journey to Sierra Leone and Kenema Hospital to serve as a physician in the Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) started more than a month before I actually traveled there. It is as much a mental journey as a physical one. What was once a textbook understanding of the virus quickly became an intimate experience of losing many around me to the disease. Before I left, traveling to West Africa to take care of these patients was an abstract humanitarian imperative for me. Now that I’m back, having seen what I have seen, I could never forgive myself if I did not make another trip.
The first day in Sierra Leone, the day of arrival, all of the flight attendants put on gloves shortly before we landed. As I walked out into the customs halls in Lungi Airport in Freetown, every wall was plastered with posters providing information about Ebola. We were asked to complete a health questionnaire and fever check — one of dozens I would receive during my time in the country. In the dark rainy night, the water taxi that carried us from Lungi airport to Freetown seemed otherworldly. Seeing my co-clinicians, who had arrived a few hours before me, at the hotel was a big step in helping me reorient to the purpose of my journey.