Inside an Ebola Treatment Unit: A Nurse Shares Her Experiences in Liberia

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

“It is extraordinarily difficult to establish an IV line in a dehydrated patient by generator-powered light while double gloved, with one’s goggles fogging.”—Deborah Wilson

Author Deborah Wilson at the Foya ETU cemetery. Photograph by Marcos Leitão.In one of this month’s CE features, “Inside an Ebola Treatment Unit: A Nurse’s Report,” author Deborah Wilson offers readers a rare look from the frontlines of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Her stories about her patients and colleagues are as compelling as they are informative. Here’s a short overview of the article:

In December 2013, the first cases of the most recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD; formerly known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever) emerged in the West African nation of Guinea. Within months the disease had spread to the neighboring countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The international humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; known in English as Doctors Without Borders) soon responded by sending staff to set up treatment centers and outreach triage teams in all three countries. In August 2014, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international public health emergency.

In September 2014, the author was sent by MSF to work as a nurse in an Ebola treatment unit in Foya, Liberia for five weeks. This article describes her […]

Ebola Changes You: Reflections of a Nurse Upon Return from Liberia

By Deborah Wilson, RN. The author is currently an IV infusion therapist with the Berkshire Visiting Nurses Association in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and is completing her BSN at UMass Amherst. In October, she returned from Liberia, where she worked with Doctors Without Borders at a 120-bed Ebola treatment center. Names of patients mentioned in the article have been changed to protect patient privacy.

At the cemetery, newly dug graves At the cemetery, newly dug graves

I have recently returned from Liberia, where I worked as a nurse for six weeks along with a dedicated team of physicians, nurses, and other professionals, treating 60 to 80 Ebola patients a day. My 21-day transition time is recently over and, although I am back at work and school, my heart is with the West African nurses who I worked with for those weeks in September and October.

I worked in a town called Foya, managing a 120-bed Ebola treatment center (ETC). During the first two weeks, I wondered if I would last. In the grueling heat, dressed up in all that personal protective equipment (PPE), constantly sprayed with chlorine, each day I was haunted by the question of whether I’d somehow gotten infected.

It all took its toll. Twice a shift the nursing team would put on PPE […]

Time to Pause and Commit to Act

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Of all the holidays, Thanksgiving seems to me to be the most pure—it began way before the greeting card folks thought of it and commercialized it. And it was born out of something that often gets lost during the course of our busy days—connecting with others and saying thank you for what they do or what they mean to us.

Christine Moffa, AJN’s clinical editor, and I were discussing the holiday at a staff meeting, saying how we had never minded working on Thanksgiving. Patients, visitors, and colleagues—everyone was in a friendly, appreciative mode. Most hospital cafeterias served turkey dinners to the staff, so everyone was happy about that—and everyone got to have a real dinner break for a change!

It also seems that at Thanksgiving we’re still in the “giving” mode, maybe because it’s early in the holiday season. My first request-for-your-support e-mail this season came from photographer Ed Kashi; it’s one I’m glad he sent. Ed is an incredibly talented megastar of documentary photography (in my humble opinion); we’ve been fortunate to have some of his work grace our covers (July 2007 and our 2008 Family Caregiver supplement, as examples) and articles. His e-mail was about an online auction of photographs called Commit to Action, a collaborative project by VII Photo (a photo agency) and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to generate funds for MSF work around the world.

The […]

2016-11-21T13:14:51-05:00November 24th, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
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