“And then even my cook got Ebola, through her husband who had been to a secret burial and didn’t tell anybody. I believe the instructions for these drug combinations came from God, in the form of enlightenment. Intuitively, I developed a mix of drugs and infused patients with plenty of fluids to keep them hydrated. So I started researching and studying every night between midnight and three am. I decided to fight aggressively with all of my power, to help patients survive Ebola. Something inside me changed and I decided to stay. I felt the obligation of not letting them down. They asked me, “Now that everyone has left, will you leave us too?” That was an important moment for me. All the international staff had left the hospital and I was the only doctor left in ELWA. “We had used the Hospital’s chapel as an isolation unit for infected patients and one morning I found myself in a room with the remaining medical personnel. All I could say was, “Barbara, you are not going to die, you are going to live.” Disco Hill, the Ebola graveyard outside Monrovia, where thousands of Ebola victims are buried. I looked at her and didn’t know what to do. ”One of my nurses, Barbara, turned out to be infected with the virus. Brown recalls how he found himself at a turning point. Brown, “for example, changing the color of the iris in your eye.”ĭuring the climax of the outbreak, as more and more infected patients were brought to the hospital, Dr. Ebola also does strange things with your body”, says Dr. I saw colleagues not willing to listen to their instincts and to succumb because they were not careful enough. “I would look at the person, at his general condition, and if something told me this was an Ebola case, I would immediately order personnel to isolate the patient and not to touch him or her.” Brown quickly developed an instinct on how to identify a possible Ebola case, just by looking into a patient’s eyes. People have varying incubation times, so for me as a physician, this was very difficult to manage.”ĭr. “We could have saved many more people with the appropriate diagnostic tools and we were treating patients based only on an assessment of their symptoms. “Another challenge we had, was the lack of any diagnostic ability”, says Dr. The chapel at ELWA hospital that served as isolation unit during the Ebola outbreak. People had to come up with other strategies to ensure basic care for infected patients and because these processes were slow, it was a big challenge to get started. Whenever we ran out of materials, again it was a challenge to ensure protection. Production of such materials in Liberia was out of the question, so we had to rely on international help where protective gear was flown in from other countries before we could even get started. Even basic protective gear, for treating the patients, was not available. This was the infrastructure we had to deal with. We never really had anything like an intensive care unit or an isolation unit and the one we had built was the only isolation unit in the capital. “Collaboration with our international partners was a great help. We developed our strategy, and it worked. There was a lot of fear and panic among the staff but as time went by, I began to discover a few facts about the disease how one could protect oneself to safely treat patients and how one could create a safe environment for other colleagues. I received a lot of insults because of this. Initially, the biggest challenge was to find personnel who were willing to go to the isolation units. People quit their jobs because of fears about how easy it was to contract the disease and die. Brown and his team faced during the outbreak was tragic. I was happy to be involved and happy to have survived the epidemic in Liberia.”īecause of the nature of the Ebola virus, insufficient research has been done so far to fully understand it. As a healthcare provider, I think our first goal is preventing people from getting ill and helping them to recover from their diseases. “Personally, I was simply happy to save lives. “I was involved in the fight against Ebola during the outbreak in Liberia, where I headed the ELWA 2 Ebola Treatment Unit, and I was featured in TIME magazine as “Person of the Year” because of our efforts during the outbreak.” We asked him to recall the Ebola crisis in 2014 and tell us about what he went through. Jerry Brown is the Medical Director of the ELWA Hospital and one of the very few general surgeons serving the hospital.
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