Purfield Kenema Transcript

Purfield Kenema Transcript

I knew I'd be doing epi, which is pretty much it. I thought that that meant doing contact tracing and case management. I thought that would be the whole thing, because in a normal--"normal," air quotes--Ebola outbreak, it's twenty, fifty people.

That's what the database, the Epi Info database, was set up for, was to do contact tracing so that you can find people who may have been exposed and you can stop the spread of disease. I thought that's what I was going to be doing. I knew there was a hospital, and I think they told us that our office would be at the hospital, but I thought a hospital that had a few Ebola patients. It also had TB patients and a peds [pediatrics] ward and surgery and, you know, everything else, because this was the big district hospital.

There was nothing. It was just Ebola. There were some TB patients who were still there because they lived there, because they got direct-observe therapy there. They were the only patients at the whole hospital. When I first got there, for the first few days, I think there were still a few people in the men's and women's ward. Then one of the nurses from the women's ward, she'd been sick. I think I'd been there for just a couple of days. I didn't know her, and this was to be--because my perception of Kenema is that there's no one in any of the wards. But in the first few days, there were. There was a physician who got sick while I was there. He had not treated Ebola patients, but he'd not protected himself. He got sick, and he passed away. There was another nurse I didn't know from the female ward. I think I got to Kenema on Thursday, and I think it was Saturday at night or early in the morning. She'd been sick and a couple other people had been caring for her in the women's ward. She just didn't go home, but she wasn't a patient. She was still working, but sick, and they were helping care for her. Finally, they convinced her that she should go over to the Ebola ward and get tested. She literally collapsed and died on the walk over.

It was just these little fires pop up. So, now there's more people. Now the entire women's ward was potentially infected, and the other nurses were infected. Those first few days, we would walk through the women's and men's ward. It was a cut-through. You'd walk through there to get to the hot zone, the Ebola ward. Then one morning we came and there were these beds stacked up that wouldn't allow anybody to walk through. Then you see the decontamination and then the next thing you know, it's a ghost town. There's no one in there. There's no one in the men's ward. Walk the very circuitous route around, try to avoid that at all costs.