To be the Infected

Our census is not staggering; seven in total, one patient is to be discharged as he does not have Ebola.  The 4-year-old Asiatu sat on a chair looking at her mother who came to visit her sitting in the visitor’s tent across from the orange fence.  The separation might as well be like a vast ocean. She did not look very happy and neither was she very ill.  However the national nurses came and picked her up to give her medicines which were more or less forced into her tiny mouth and in the end she threw them all up.  One of the nationals told us that that is how children are given their medicines here.

In the Probable Ward was a 14-week pregnant woman who was picked up yesterday from a quarantined home, bleeding form her womb.  While sitting on a stone slab in the village she fell backwards and hit her head.  This morning her breathing was labored, dry blood coated her nostrils, she had expelled her fetus during the night but her placenta remained.  She had a swollen left side of her face with a huge bruise, and bleeding in her conjunctiva.  Whether her vaginal bleeding had led to shock with her fainting and falling yesterday and resulted in possible head trauma, we would never know.  She was drawing her last breaths and died shortly in the morning.  Her Ebola test was just sent.  If she were positive, there would be a lot more people potentially exposed in the quarantined home.

Ishmael still refused to eat.  The kitchen did not cook his peppered soup.  He continued to have diarrhea but he had no fever this morning.

The healthcare worker who contracted Ebola walked out of the ambulance into the corridor of the Confirmed Ward yesterday, walking the lonely anxiety-provoking walk, greeted by the fellow healthcare workers.  I am sure every scenario had been gone over to find the very act of potential breach.  To have seen and cared for so many Ebola patients, their ups and downs, their horrendous outcomes and triumphs and now to be on the other side of the infected must be quite surreal and scary.  We spent some time to dispel the notion that the patient was not to impose blame but to think on the positive.  We as the caretakers would do our utmost to help the patient but the patient would need to have faith.  I reached out to give a parting pat on the thigh and looked into the hemorrhagic eyes; there was fear, reassurance, gratitude, and a sense of unity.  For a brief moment as I walked from the backyard into the ward, my eyes were moist from trying to put myself in the patient’s shoes; would I fare any better?  This is every Ebola fighter’s nightmare, to contract the very agent that one has been trying so hard to save the patients from killing them.  To date, 840 health workers have tested positive for Ebola in West Africa with 491 reported deaths.

Today all of us seemed to pay a little more attention to how we conducted ourselves in the ETC.

Jenni Marsh from the South China Morning Post based in Hong Kong interviewed me a few weeks ago and here is a link to their magazine publication.  My son's in-laws in Hong Kong said it is the cover story of the magazine: Behind the Mask, One Doctor's experience on the Ebola Frontline.  It is nice to have the Ebola story reached Asia.

http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1736695/ebola-diary-dr-kwan-kew-lais-harrowing-journal-her-time