Dr. Craig Spencer, New York’s first and to date only Ebola patient, said in an essay published on Wednesday that he was falsely accused of putting the public at risk and was superficially depicted as “a fraud, a hipster and a hero” after he was hospitalized last fall.
“The truth is, I am none of those things,” Dr. Spencer wrote in a personal but also polemical essay published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. He added: “I’m just someone who answered a call for help and was lucky enough to survive.”
The essay is one of the first times he has given a detailed public accounting of the course of his illness and how it affected him, physically and psychologically. He also recently gave an interview to WNYC radio.
Dr. Spencer, 33, an attending physician in the emergency department of NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, wrote that when he returned to New York from Guinea, where he had been treating Ebola patients with Doctors Without Borders, “the suffering I’d seen, combined with exhaustion, made me feel depressed for the first time in my life.”
Dr. Spencer was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center on Oct. 23 after reporting a fever of 100.3. City officials said he had felt fatigue on Oct. 21, prompting some, including at one point Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, to suggest he had been careless for having gone bowling, riding the subway and eating at restaurants in the days before he had a fever.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists fatigue as a symptom of Ebola. But in the essay, Dr. Spencer said he had not been symptomatic before Oct. 23, and was simply exhausted by what he had been through in Guinea.
Yet, he complained, he was vilified by the public, politicians and the news media.
“The whole country soon knew where I like to walk, eat, and unwind,” he wrote. “People excoriated me for going out in the city when I was symptomatic, but I hadn’t been symptomatic — just sad.”
He was released after 19 days of treatment, and did not infect anyone else.
In the essay, Dr. Spencer wrote that when he realized he had Ebola, it was both his worst fear come true and almost a relief, because it put an end to the constant fear of becoming infected, a fear that caused him to wake in the middle of the night in Guinea sweating, his heart racing.
But it was also a complete surprise, he said, because following the advice of a friend, he had kept a spreadsheet while in Africa, documenting the level of risk of catching the disease that he thought he faced every day, and every day it had been “minimal.”
He described how while ill, he lost 20 pounds, had a fever for two weeks “and struggled to the bathroom up to a dozen times a day.”
He saw himself as a pawn of politicians, who, “caught up in the election season, took advantage of the panic to try to appear presidential.” He criticized Mr. Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey for reacting to his illness by imposing quarantines on health workers and others who had been exposed to Ebola patients in West Africa but showed no symptoms.
“Instead of being welcomed as respected humanitarians, my U.S. colleagues who have returned home from battling Ebola have been treated as pariahs,” Dr. Spencer wrote.
The New York State’s Health Department said in a statement on Wednesday: “We recognize the extraordinary dedication of these health care workers in helping to end this epidemic, but also recognize the need to protect the health of all New Yorkers. Our quarantine plan struck this balance.”
Despite the risks and hardships, Dr. Spencer wrote, treating Ebola patients was cathartic. “Every day, I looked forward to putting on the personal protective equipment and entering the treatment center,” he wrote. “No matter how exhausted I felt when I woke up, an hour of profuse sweating in the suit and the satisfaction I got from treating ill patients washed away my fear and made me feel new again.”
- http://bit.ly/1EtbyAF
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu