Journalist Erika Check Hayden travels to Sierra Leone and sees Ebola up close and personal for the first time.

Erika Check Hayden is an award-winning San Francisco-based science, health, and technology reporter. She writes for the science journal Nature, and on a freelance basis for a variety of publications. She is the incoming director of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Science Communication Program. Find her at erikacheck.com or on Twitter @Erika_Check.

This story originally aired on our podcast on Jan. 6, 2017.

Story Transcript

Seeing the babies was the hardest part. It was December 2014 and I was reporting on Ebola in Sierra Leone. I’d arrived at a clinic in the city of Bo in the middle of the country. There were so many sick babies coming into this clinic that the doctors there had created a dedicated ward just for infants who had Ebola. That’s how bad it was. They had their own special tent.

Just before I’d arrived that day, a mother and a baby with Ebola had checked in together, but there was no sound coming from that tent. The whole time I was there, the baby tent was completely silent.

I knew from my own small kids that a healthy child would never lie still and quiet for hours. The next day, I learned that the baby had died. His mother lived, but the doctors were worried that when she found out about her son, she would give up on her own fragile recovery.

At another clinic in a city called Makeni, I met a little boy. He was scooting around the nurse’s station in a rolling walker. He had checked in with his mom and she’d died of Ebola and her family had refused to take this boy in. They were afraid of Ebola. They somehow thought that because the boy had been with his mom when she was sick, he might somehow infect them too. It couldn’t happen, but they wouldn’t take him in and he was an orphan. He had nowhere else to go and so he was living there at the Ebola clinic. It was hard to see. It might be hard to hear about now. Just think how hard it was for that boy and for his family.

At the same clinic, I met a woman in her twenties. She was very pregnant. She didn’t look sick at all, but she did look terrified. I noticed that she was sitting on a bench in the intense afternoon sun, and I wondered why she didn’t move to a nearby bench in the shade. She said that her name was Mabinti. When I met her, she was about eight months pregnant. Just a little bit before then, she’d felt a pain in her abdomen. She wanted to be sure that everything was okay with her pregnancy and so she went to get it checked out at a local clinic, but the nurses there wouldn’t treat her. They were spooked by Ebola.

So many healthcare workers had died taking care of pregnant women with Ebola, because these women often miscarried their babies, and when they miscarry, they bleed a lot. Their blood contains the infectious Ebola virus so these nurses weren’t going to take a chance. They told Mabinti that they wouldn’t see her, that she could go get an Ebola test and if the result was negative, then she could come back and they would take care of her then so she did what they said. She went to get the test.

The problem was that while she waited for the results of the test, she had to stay in this facility that’s called a holding center; that’s where I met her. That’s where you go if doctors suspect you have Ebola or if they know you have Ebola but you can’t get a hospital bed. She was living there in the holding center waiting for the result of her test, side by side with people who had Ebola. So every day that she stayed in this holding center increased her chance that she would become infected with Ebola if she wasn’t already. It’s no wonder that she didn’t go sit on the shady bench because it was occupied by sick people who had Ebola. They were sitting and lying down on that bench. She was terrified for her life and for her baby. I knew that I would have done the same things she had and yet now she was living with this unfathomable daily risk. I really felt for her because my own kids were two and four at that point, and reporting from Sierra Leone was the first occasion when I spent any real time away from them.

Having kids had reordered my world. I had been a journalist for a decade before I had my first child. I reported on all kinds of things and I’d travelled lots of places and then I had my son and then my daughter. I wanted to be with them so I cut way back on work and I tried to squeeze it into a normal forty-hour week. I pretty much stopped travelling. I knew that I was dialing back on my own expectations for my career, and I didn’t know if I’d ever feel the same way again about work.

Then 2014 came and the Ebola crisis hit. As a science journalist who covers infectious disease, I had to get on top of the story so I was reading and reporting, basically trying to figure out why the epidemic had gotten so far out of control. There had been Ebola epidemics before this one where dozens of people or maybe a hundred people had died, but there had never been anything like this where tens of thousands of people got sick and thousands died.

One day, I was reading an article by a nurse who worked for Doctors Without Borders. It’s the medical aid group that cared for a lot of patients in this epidemic. She describes treating a two-year-old girl who died in an Ebola clinic without any of her family around her.

At that time, my own daughter was two. As I read this, I wondered what it would be like for her to be sick and alone in a hospital without me or her dad there to hold her. Later that night, we were playing together in her room before bedtime and I tried to imagine checking her into a hospital knowing that I might never see her alive again. It made me feel hollow inside to know that mothers in Sierra Leone were doing that every day. I started to see what was really so horrible about Ebola. Not that it might make you bleed from the eyes and not that it would very likely kill you, but that it was ripping apart families and neighborhoods and communities and all the social fabric that holds people together.

A few days before I left Sierra Leone, I called Mabinti’s husband to check up on her. He said that Mabinti’s Ebola test result had come back and it was negative so that seemed like great news. Mabinti could go home now, right? But no, there was a catch because by that point she had been living in that holding center for weeks and she was in close proximity with Ebola patients. Now she had to get a second Ebola test just to make sure that she hadn’t become infected in the holding center while waiting for the results of her first test so she was still in the holding center waiting for the results of that second test. She was still in danger.  

I came back home and when I got back to my house on Christmas Day, my own kids were happy and healthy and well cared for, just as I knew they would be, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Mabinti and whether she was okay. She’d done the same thing I would have done, but because Sierra Leone is a poor county and because the rest of the world took way too long to respond to the Ebola epidemic, she was fighting to stay alive and to keep her family together while I was helping my kids try on their new Christmas pajamas.

After Christmas, I called Mabinti’s husband again to check up on her. She said that against all odds, Mabinti had survived. Her second Ebola test was negative and she had been allowed to leave the holding center. Then, in February, she had her baby, a completely healthy little girl named Sale. It felt like a miracle. It shouldn’t have to be. Thanks.