Therapy didn’t ease pain of Ebola ordeal but coming back to the clinic, meeting survivors, has given me closure at last
Apart from her eyes, M’balu could not see the woman under the protective suit who gently bathed her burning skin and changed her soiled sheets as she lay close to death in an Ebola clinic.
She couldn’t hear her voice, either, but the terrified 15-year-old could see her name, scribbled across the top of her visor – Pauline.
“The name made her human and I felt safe,” M’balu explains.
Weeks later, that name made headlines across the globe.
British nurse Pauline Cafferkey returned to Britain in December 2014, after six weeks volunteering with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, West Africa, only to find she too had caught the disease.
Dubbed the Ebola angel for her selfless efforts during the epidemic – which also spread into neighbouring Liberia and Guinea, killing 11,000 in total – Pauline was diagnosed with the contagious disease days after returning home.
Knowing only too well what could lie in store, she propped her will on her dressing table and was quickly flown by the RAF in an isolation tent to the Royal Free Hospital in North London. She endured three weeks of hell but survived, only to be struck down a second time nine months later, when the virus also triggered meningitis. Ever since, she has fought crippling side effects, including initially being unable to walk. Now she has returned to Sierra Leone for the first time, in a bid to find “closure”. In an emotional meeting, she was reunited with M’balu, who, with Pauline’s help, beat the virus. “I have never doubted what I did coming here, but meeting M’balu is the ultimate confirmation it was worthwhile,” she says, holding the girl’s hand. The excited teenager’s cuddles – in a country where, in 2014, there was a no-touching policy – moves the nurse to tears. “What I have been through has taken an emotional toll,” she says. “I have tried counselling, but it didn’t
work for me. But coming back here has been therapeutic. It’s about being able to visit communities, meet survivors, see what they are achieving now.
“It has eased the pain of the past two years a little bit.”
The unassuming Scot, 42, says she doesn’t like to get teary, but admits: “It has been good to have a good cry.
“It’s not self-pity, but I can empathise a lot more with people here because I have been through it myself.
“I cried when I met M’balu because I felt for her, reliving what she had suffered. For a while I thought about what I had been through every hour of every day. It was all-consuming.”
In the throes of the disease, Pauline, M’balu and many other victims, suffered severe fever, diarrhoea and vomiting. Ebola can also cause the body to swell and the organs to fail.
Pauline describes the feeling of battling the illness as “nothingness”. She cared for hundreds of patients in the Kerry Town treatment centre, close to the capital Freetown, who experienced the same suffering.
M’balu has always remembered her, and has been desperate to thank her “Ebola angel” – a nickname modest Pauline feels embarrassed about.
The teen – who lost her sister, father and five-year-old niece to Ebola – is lucky. She smiles: “What she did was beyond human, to sacrifice her life.”
Afterwards, Pauline, from Cambuslang, near Glasgow, decides to return to the Kerry Town clinic where she first met M’balu.
She is nervous, but when we get there, she is stunned. It has been reduced to rubble. She walks me slowly around the eerie site, pointing out the shreds of blue tarpaulin that used to form the makeshift walls of five wards containing 80 beds.
Pauline quietly describes the set-up. “Ambulances would come, packed with ten or more,” she says. “Some would have died on the way. The vans would be hosed with chlorine.
“If the patients were too weak to walk, we would push them in wheelbarrows. I would take messages to the fence for patients’ relatives – they could not come in.”
“It would be generally quiet – the patients were shell-shocked. But sometimes people would become hysterical with fear or delirium.”
She says she is glad the site has been demolished: “This gives me closure, a full stop.” And she smiles when she learns that a new hospital is to be built here. “It is for the best. The community would not have returned to the old clinic. This is progress,” she says.
Progress is what Pauline strives for, both for herself and Sierra Leone. Her recovery was slow after her second Ebola attack, just days after receiving a Daily Mirror Pride of Britain Award.
Amid the delirium and searing pain, she begged her doctors “to drill a hole in her head”, then asked “to be left alone to die”. “I was crying so much I wanted to scream,” she says.
Bit by bit, she made progress, first in a wheelchair, then on crutches, initially battling deafness and double vision in one eye. She also had to deal with a distressing Public Health England inquiry, which claimed she covered up her early Ebola symptoms.
When she first landed back in the UK, she had a temperature. She was accused of allowing it to be recorded lower than it really was, at the chaotic screening centre hurriedly set up at Heathrow, meaning she was allowed to fly on to Glasgow. Once back home, she was swiftly diagnosed with Ebola.
She has since been cleared of any wrongdoing and has been able to return to her passion – nursing.
And she wants the same for other survivors like M’balu. She feels guilty that she benefited from better facilities in the UK. “If I had battled Ebola here, I would have died,” she admits.
She is also aware that she does not face the same continuing hardship as Ebola survivors here. With many breadwinners lost to the virus, families are battling poverty and some children cannot eat, let alone go to school.
UK charity Street Child has helped over 12,000 Ebola orphans in Sierra Leone and Liberia – but estimates a further 1,400 are struggling to survive.
M’balu sells rice to get by, but she is desperate for an education. In a touching moment, she tells Pauline: “I want to become a nurse, like you.”
It is a bold ambition, but it does not surprise Pauline. “Coming back has helped me remember the positives.
“These people are very resilient – even Ebola can not dent their spirit. It inspires me to be the same.”
To donate to Street Child to help the Ebola orphans, visit street-child.co.uk.