Gratefuldoc: Going Home

Here in Lunsar, the time has passed rapidly. The rainy season is still a couple of months away. The three months that I have been here has not seen more than a whisper of rain, and so water is becoming more of a scarce commodity. There is dust married to the leaves everywhere, as they say here in Sierra Leone. The river down from Bai Suba which was the local gathering place for all things, washing cars, trucks, clothes, and bodies, usually all at the same time, has long since dried up. I don't know where the new place for those activities would be, but it must be harder for everyone now. I saw a water truck the other day delivering water up and down the street, since many wells are less and less supplied, unless they are very deep.
The bustle and excitement of having 12-15 doctors and that many nurses as well has decreased to where the center will be down to 5 doctors when I leave. It will be harder to fill the shifts, and if someone is sick or unable to work, it will be impossible. But with the census down, it doesn't make a lot of sense to recruit a lot of doctors for the time being. So the Ebola treatment center will get along with only 1 doctor per shift. There are many observations that one could make after a time here. You certainly have to change your mindset from "do everything immediately" to do things in an order that keeps you safe. So many things that you have to learn are now just second nature. From donning and doffing the personal protective suits, automatically starting in the suspect ward, moving down to probable, and then finally to the confirmed ward--none of those things require a lot of thought any more. I sometimes wonder about the good that we did here. After crunching the numbers, I found that the death rate when we treated more aggressively with IV rehydration and more aggressive fluid resuscitation was not that much different then it was when things were done less aggressively. But as I stated before the main work of the ETC is to get people that have the disease in an environment where they can be taken care of and helped with the pain, and other discomforts, and to protect the community.
And so, we wonder, what sort of time frame is there until Ebola is done? At one point, it looked like April 1st might be a possibility, but now the rate of fall has decreased and more likely plateaued in the country. However, in our center, we are pleased that the number of confirmed cases has fallen dramatically however. Only 3 deaths from Ebola this month, compared to 16 or so per month for the first 2 months I was here...
But we keep plugging away, and won't stop, even though I will not be personally involved, until all Ebola is don don. (meaning finished). God willing, that will happen sooner than later. I leave you with some photos from my last couple of days.