Surviving Ebola: 'It was the best Christmas present ever: the gift of life'
Version 0 of 1. Dr Martin Deahl is a consultant psychiatrist from Shropshire. He works with the international aid agency Goal at their Ebola treatment centre in Port Loko, Sierra Leone. This is his fourth report for the Guardian. I’m relaxing following a night shift, reflecting on one of the most surreal 24 hours and certainly most extraordinary Christmases of my life. First the good, and most important news: patients are visibly recovering and you don’t need a medical degree to see it. For our first week, patients were bed-bound, distressed and unable to help themselves. Today, six out of 12 were walking around, sitting outside the ward in the sun and largely self-caring. So we must be doing something right. Late on Christmas Eve we got the lab-test result for Gabriel, one of the patients on the confirmed ward. He collapsed two weeks ago just as the UK’s international development secretary, Justine Greening, was arriving at the Goal Ebola Treatment Centre (ETC) for a visit. I had helped him to a chair and unwittingly became an Ebola contact in the process. It’s easy to forget that it’s not just the red zone that’s dangerous: Ebola is everywhere. Gabriel’s father had died a couple of weeks ago, of diabetes, or so it was thought. His son attended the funeral, where the traditional rite of washing the body was observed – a typical story of the typical Ebola patient. Two days after, he collapsed, his PCR (the definitive Ebola test) proved positive, and Gabriel was admitted to the ETC. Two weeks later, and after a stormy course, he was much better and everybody was hoping for the best. I went to the lab to get the result, it was late in the evening near the end of my shift. We had waited all day. The result was negative – relief and joy, he would live. Now to break the news. But how? It was a momentous Christmas for Gabriel, the best Christmas present ever: the gift of life. Momentous for us, as well. Our first “cured” case. We called Gabriel to the fence separating the red zone from the outside world. I assembled a dozen or so available staff, and told Gabriel we had some serious news for him. He looked nervous – rightly so. I turned to my colleagues, waved my arms, and on a count of three gave a rousing (if somewhat discordant) chorus of “We wish you a merry Christmas.” Gabriel looked bemused, until we came to the amended second verse: “Your PCR result is negative, your PCR result is negative, your PCR result is negative, so you can go home.” He smiled, he wept, we wept, elated. It was the best Christmas present I’d had, or ever would deliver. Christmas had got off to a very good start. The next memorable, albeit darker, event that evening came while I was in the red zone struggling to persuade a reluctant four-year-old to take fluids. The child’s bed was at the entrance to the ward, and my efforts to feed him could be seen from the safety of the green zone. A large group of Danish doctors and nurses, seconded to Goal as our replacements, were meanwhile on a tour of the ETC site. As they passed the entrance to the ward and saw me cradling the little boy in my arms, they spontaneously burst into song and began dancing. What they were unaware of, and couldn’t see, was the body of a middle-aged woman who’d died earlier that afternoon being shoe-horned into a body bag further down the ward. I couldn’t wave or shout at the Danes to tell them to stop, I was cradling the child with one hand and had his drink in the other. To my left, festive merriment, to my right, the solemn rites of passage marking the transition of patient to corpse. I travelled back to base in the staff minibus, too late for carols, but the Christmas party was in full swing. The atmosphere at base is normally subdued, so it was a surprise to find raucous colleagues, some of them a little worse for wear. Even here, the bizarre and surreal were evident. The president of Sierra Leone had given us the gift of a bull (Sierra Leoneans don’t eat cows: their milk is too valuable), a goat and 400,000 Leones (about £60) to treat ourselves (ie, buy booze). Goal pulled out all the stops to ensure that we enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner, Christmas decorations and even a Santa bearing mince pies. Goal also delivered to us parcels sent by loved ones back home. So Christmas ended on an upbeat note. It was so much easier to enjoy ourselves knowing that we were starting to achieve positive outcomes and that patients were recovering. Since Gabriel, another two patients have been discharged. |