[ 2014-12-30 ]

Nurse Pauline Cafferkey had been volunteering at a Save the Children specialist Ebola hospital in Sierra Leone

Ebola nurse spoke movingly of saving lives


The first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola in
Britain may have contracted the deadly virus after
attending a Christmas service in Sierra Leone.

Pauline Cafferkey, 39, a nurse, is being treated
in an isolation unit at a London hospital, having
been transferred on a military-style plane from
her local hospital in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Miss Cafferkey, 39, had written movingly of her
work treating Ebola patients in an online diary
published shortly before she was diagnosed with
the disease.

A colleague who volunteered with her as part of a
30-strong team believes she may have contracted
the deadly disease after attending a church
service without wearing her protective suit on
Christmas morning.

Dr Martin Deahl, from Newport, Shropshire, also
criticised the 'shambolic' testing process at
Heathrow airport. Miss Cafferkey was able to pass
through Heathrow, board a flight with other
passengers to Glasgow and return home before she
began to feel ill.

Dr Deahl said: "I would bet anything that she
caught this while out in the community. I went to
church myself on Christmas morning and I have no
doubt Pauline probably contracted the virus doing
something similar.

"We had a rule known as ABC which stood for
Absolute no Body Contact but when you are in the
community it is difficult to stick to the rules
and easy to become complacent. It is also
difficult when children come up to you and hug
you."

Dr Martin Deahl, from Newport, Shrops, who sat
next to her on the flight to Heathrow, said of the
screening process: "The precautions and checks at
the airport were shambolic. They ran out of
testing kits and didn't seem to know what they
were doing."

Miss Cafferkey, a nurse for 16 years, works at
Blantyre Health Centre in South Lanarkshire. She
was volunteering with Save the Children to help
with the Ebola crisis having flown out with a team
of 30 NHS medical staff who had volunteered for
the assignment.

Miss Cafferkey, spoke movingly in an online diary
of her time spent tending to victims of the
disease.

She wrote of the risks she was taking in the diary
published shortly before her return to the UK.

Health officials are urging anybody who may have
had contact with Miss Cafferkey since her return
to the UK to contact them on a specially set up
telephone hotline, inlcuding passenegers on a
flight from Heathrow to Glasgow.


In her diary, published by The Scotsman newspaper,
Miss Cafferkey wrote on her arrival in Sierra
Leone: "After nine days of training in the UK it
feels good to eventually set foot in the Ebola
Treatment Centre and begin work.

"The area where the Ebola patients are is classed
as the infective Red Zone, and the area
surrounding it, the safe Green Zone. Bizarrely we
find ourselves saying “good luck” to our
colleagues prior to entering the Red Zone, a
sobering reminder of what we are doing."

By week two, Miss Cafferkey appeared to enjoy her
new routine. "My nice community- nursing job in
Blantyre is far removed from this but at the
moment this seems a lot more real," she wrote,
"The dreams that I do remember always seem to have
an Ebola theme, it seems to be all consuming.

"The PPE [personal protective equipment]
alien-type suit that I have to wear when going
into the positive Red Zone is horrendous. It takes
about 20 minutes to dress and 15 minutes to take
the suit off at the other end.

"I feel sorry for the poor patients who have these
alien-type people caring for them. Especially so
for the young children, who are not only very sick
but have these strange creatures with only their
eyes visible trying to make them drink and take
medications."

In her third week she spoke movingly of a boy left
orphaned by the disease. The boy's sister had also
died.

"Had an awful shift this week," she wrote, "I was
with a lady who was dying. I could tell she
didn’t have long, so I was trying to make her
comfortable. There was a young boy standing at the
window looking in and I waved to him. A few
minutes later she had passed away and I heard the
boy crying outside the ward. When I went to him,
he asked if she had died. I said yes. He said she
was his mother. He had already lost his father to
Ebola, and now he had no parents.

"The sad thing is that this is a regular
occurrence and we see and hear of whole families
being wiped out by this awful disease."

By her final week, Miss Cafferkey was looking
forward to Christmas but aware that Sierra Leone
had banned celebrations to try to slow down the
the Ebola outbreak.

"The Sierra Leonean’s are normally very tactile
people who, prior to Ebola would hug and shake
hands as a normal greeting and now have to change
their culture. Even for us NHS staff, when we
accidentally touch each other we call out “no
touch” in a humorous manner," she wrote.

Source - The Telegraph

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