Hero nurse’s crusade against ‘awful disease’

The 39-year-old, who is being treated in an isolation unit at a London hospital, may have contracted the deadly virus after attending a Christmas service in Sierra Leone without wearing her protective suit.
She was part of a 30-strong team treating Ebola patients in the West African country and wrote movingly about her work in a newspaper diary.

Ms Cafferkey, a public health nurse at Blantyre Health Centre in South Lanarkshire, was deployed to Africa by the UK Government last month.

She described the pain of having to tell a young boy his mother had died from the virus.

"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," she wrote.

Ms Cafferkey, who has been a nurse for 16 years, lived alongside 14 other volunteers in a "wee shack on the beach" and passed by "a small mangrove with crocodiles every day - not your average walk to work".

At the Freetown unit where she worked, patients were treated in the infective "Red Zone", while the area around it was deemed the safe "Green Zone".

She wrote in The Scotsman: "Bizarrely we find ourselves saying 'good luck' to our colleagues prior to entering the Red Zone, a sobering reminder of what we are doing."

The work became a normal part of he life, invading her dreams and becoming "all-consuming".

"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 protective suits the volunteers wore were "horrendous", she said. They took 20 minutes to put on and were unbearably hot, but "on the up side, I feel very well protected".

"I feel sorry for the poor patients who have these alien-type people caring for them," she wrote.

"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."

One particularly traumatic experience came when she comforted a young boy who lost his mother, leaving him an orphan after his father also died.

She wrote: "I tried to console him, and he said he has a sister who also came to the treatment centre with him and his mother, but he did not know where she was.

"A young girl had died that morning. I could not be 100% sure that it was his sister, so I wasn't able to offer him any news. I took him back to his ward and gave him a drink.

"On leaving the Red Zone I checked the notes and confirmed that the girl who died that morning was his sister. His mother had seen her daughter die in the bed across from her that morning and she died a few hours later...

"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."

In her final diary piece, Ms Cafferkey, from Glasgow, said there was "no sign of anything Christmassy" in the country after the government banned the festivity and closed schools.

She described her joy at seeing survivors being discharged after getting the all-clear.

They received their last chlorine shower - the "happy wash" - and then were greeted by "local staff singing and dancing in celebration".

She wrote: "I see the discharge process as a very important part of letting the survivor know how special they are, and it helps in building community confidence.

"Not only that, but it does wonders for staff morale, as some of the things we see inside the gates are very unpleasant. It helps us remember the good work we are doing and the reason we are all here."