Touch

You come to feel like you are always wearing gloves after a while.  Purple nitrile gloves go on first when you are preparing to enter the treatment center tents.  Then surgical gloves.

Elastic as hope.
Impervious as reality.
Gloves.
Barriers of protection against a thread-like virus that is 1/100th the size of bacteria.  Mere nanometers.  Unseen.  Ungodly.  Double-gloved hands defile touch.I feel a need to touch all the patients in the ward here regardless. To let them know we are both human.  That something in all this suffering and fear can be revealed as faith. And, sadly, because we have little more at times to offer.

This morning a surgical oncologist and I did "fluid rounds." We went from bed to metal bed underneath the open expanse of the white Unicef tent making sure patients who needed them had IV's and intravenous fluids.  Fatmata, a 28 year old from a nearby village, was having voluminous diarrhea, cholera level diarrhea, and needed an IV.  So we put one in and hung a solution called lactated ringers in a 500 ml bag. And then hung another. And another.  You try to keep up with how much fluid patients are losing by giving it back to them in oral rehydration solution (a mix of salt, sugar and water) and intravenous fluids.  This storm of loss and replenishment can result in massive electrolyte shifts.  This, I am afraid, is what kills people just when you think they have beat Ebola and are getting better.  And currently we have no way to monitor this.  Unicycling in the dark.

After our shift we ate a fish stew over rice from the kitchen at the back of the compound, near where all the boots, gloves, and aprons are washed in 0.05% chlorinated water and hung out to dry overnight.  Lunch cost 1000 Leones, about 20 cents and we eat in a separate canteen tent with all the staff in staggered breaks.  I think of my children ringing the meditation bell at home before we eat to show gratitude for what we have in a moment of silent reflection.  I do the same here without that bell, before the first sip of cold water restores my lips and travels downward.  I am aware of it until it splashes into my stomach and is now part of me.  Until I sweat it out again later.
Holy water.
Holy salt.

Before I left I asked three of our Ebola survivors, who are now employees of international medical corps, if I could interview them briefly about their experience.

They graciously agreed and I learned how Miriatu worked at a hospital nearby as a cleaner and became infected with Ebola in October after her sister and her young niece both died. She spent two harrowing weeks in the Ebola treatment center but walked out cured.  Once you clear the virus, you are completely immune, meaning you can come into direct contact with the virus again and not become infected.  She works in the treatment center taking care of young children who have no family in the treatment unit or are too sick to care for them, or ,as is often the case, have died.

Then there is Isata, a beautiful woman with a childhish smile and eyes that dance.  Ebola took hold of her husband and daughter and never let them go, and she herself endured a tumultuous 30 days in the treatment center where she thought she was never going to walk out alive many a day.  This was early in the epidemic, early August, and medical staff wouldn't even enter the unit at times for fear of getting the virus.  They would leave the food and oral rehydration solution at the door and walk away.  Unlike 70% of others, she survived.

And then there is Mariata from whom Ebola has taken 10 family members in the last 6 months.  Unlike HIV which causes people to often grow increasingly thin and waste away over time, Ebola takes young healthy bodies in their primes out in a matter of days or weeks in a violent maelstrom as they drift in and out of consciousness, drained of their life fluids, alone in a ward with others in varying stages of succumbing, tended to by moon suits with only eyes to identify them as human.  And then she lost her only daughter.  "God liked her more than he liked me," she told me as we talked from plastic chairs in the still afternoon air as others ate fish stew out of  heavy duty green plastic bowls.  She now works in the psychosocial unit which provides emotional support to patients and families.

I often think that there are things from which we never really recover.

All three of these women are my heroes.  They are the ones who should adorn the cover of TIME magazine.

As I left for the evening, the harmattan winds stirred a bit of red dust and I reached out to touch it but it was already gone.