Tuesday was International Nurses Day, and one of the countries in the world perhaps most grateful for nurses right now is Liberia. The country was declared Ebola free over the weekend with the World Health Organization listing support from foreign medical teams as one of the main factors in the outbreak’s end.
A little over a month ago, NSPR reporter Sarah Bohannon talked to a Shasta County nurse who was part of the effort.
Susie Foster, a nurse practitioner at Hill Country Clinic near Redding, had traveled to the West African country of Sierra Leone to help in the battle against Ebola, also ravaging the neighboring countries of Liberia and Guinea.
At the time of their conversation, Foster had been back in the United States for about a month, but she’d only recently been allowed back into the public. After she’d returned to Redding from West Africa she had to be quarantined for 21 days — meaning she had to stay three feet away from everyone at home. That included her husband, and even her dog.
“In some ways, the quarantine was the hardest part, because I went from being so busy, to coming back to the United States for 21 days without being busy," she said. "And I had a lot of time to think — think about what I did, and what I saw, and the implications of what I did and what I saw.”
In Sierra Leone, Foster worked mostly in Port Loko at the Maforki Ebola Treatment Unit. There she helped care for patients who had Ebola, and she helped assess whether or not patients who met case definition for Ebola were actually infected with the virus.
“Tuberculosis has some similar symptoms," Foster said. "And Malaria has some similar symptoms. And complications of HIV and AIDS has some similar symptoms so it was difficult to say does this patient have Ebola, if the test says no, then what do they have and what do we do next?”
Although most of the time Foster was too busy working long days to even think about whether or not she’d contracted the virus, she said the thought did cross her mind — and it did scare her. Even so it wasn’t enough to keep her from extending her trip from its original six weeks to nine. And even now she said she’d go back if she could.
Since she’s been home Foster says she’s heard from many different people that she’s a hero. But Foster says that’s not how she sees it. She said she thinks it’s the people of Sierra Leone and the nurses, doctors and support staff that have been there since the beginning of the outbreak who are the true heroes.
“They haven’t been able to go home many of them because they live in villages that won’t accept them back as long as they’re working in an Ebola Treatment Unit," she said. "So they live at the treatment unit, they eat there, they sleep there, they go to church near there, or mosque near there and many of them haven’t seen their families in a really long time. And they’re doing it because they care for their country and they know it’s the right thing for them to do for their country. And so I really think that those are the true heroes of this Ebola fight.”
Saturday the World Health Organization officially declared Sierra Leone’s neighboring country, Liberia, free of Ebola. Sierra Leone and Guinea each reported nine cases of Ebola last week. That’s the lowest weekly total this year.
More than 11,000 people have died in these three countries since the outbreak started in March 2014. Medical staff accounted for 507 of the deaths.