Watching a life drain away Ebola is mean. It’s harsh and it can tear families apart one by one, or take them all out together. We recently had a teenage girl bleed to death over two days of IV-site oozing. Sounds easy to fix, right? Pressure dressing, elevation, blah blah. Sorry, that’s not how things work in an Ebola unit. You do all the normal interventions but a 20-gauge needle hole in a hand can slowly and fully drain the life source out of someone. Walking into a room that is covered in blood, finding a semi-conscious girl face down on a bed pooling with barely congealed blood is hard. It’s harder the second day when you know all your efforts couldn’t slow that life destruction. I cleaned her up, and put her in a pair of still-tagged jeans. She half smiled and took some medicines. I won’t forget her smile. Nor her soft moans as her body was fading away. This morning, I carried a baby to the tent morgue. The baby’s father had died days earlier in the ambulance ride to our ETU. The baby tested positive for malaria. We are still waiting for Ebola tests to come back on the mother and baby. The floppy, listless baby seemed to be turning a corner last night at 10. He smiled and took medicine willingly. His mother, lying near him, was vomiting and too weak to care for him any more. We went back inside a second time at 4am and stayed a while. Baby drank and we tried to get him to learn how to drink from a bottle so he could fend for himself. I came out joyed at baby’s bounceback! At around 5.30am, the mother came out crying. Baby had died. It was a shock and a testament to how rapidly situations can change. On the trip in to get the baby, two more patients had expired. The high elation for our recovered patients is what it is because of the contrast of the deep sorrows of the many lows. Ebola is not slowing down yet. I am trying my hardest to encourage everyone to drink through the nausea and vomiting, to eat, and to try to have hope of recovery. Nursing wise, we are doing high-level care. But the focus is getting OK care to more people than good care to just a few. I have obviously had a hard few days and I am sorry for being graphic. But this is what it really is like being in Liberia during Ebola
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:30:47 +0000