SEATTLE — More than a week after returning from Sierra Leone, Seattle trauma nurse Karin Huster says she’s just now stopped dreaming about Ebola.
During the five weeks she spent this fall in the northern district of Port Loko, the area with the highest rate of transmission of the raging virus, the 47-year-old mother of two spent her days caring for the sick and dying — and her nights obsessing about how to do better.
“I dreamed every day about my work, what I should do, what I could have done,” said Huster, who was the clinical leader for the Boston-based agency Partners in Health at the Maforki Ebola Treatment Unit. “I woke up in the middle of the night. My brain couldn’t stop.”
By the time she left, Huster figured that the center that opened Nov. 1 had seen more than 500 suspected and confirmed Ebola patients, including nearly 100 who survived the world’s worst outbreak of the deadly disease.
That’s only a fraction of the more than 20,000 Ebola cases — including 7,800 deaths — reported in West Africa since March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But for Huster and other Seattle-area Ebola volunteers, the successes represent personal victories in the global battle to defeat the ongoing epidemic.
“You realize that this is exactly where you should be,” she said. “It really feels like you’re doing the right thing.”
There’s no firm count of the number of health workers in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest or even the nation who’ve volunteered to go to West Africa to fight Ebola.
About 5,000 people logged into a portal launched by the United States Agency for International Development in September, when it became clear that the crisis demanded trained volunteers. But how many of those actually deployed and where they went is still unclear, said Carol Han, a USAID spokeswoman. CDC officials say they’d enrolled nearly 350 people, including Huster, in Ebola training classes, with 120 confirmed for next month.
Anecdotally, there are reports of several — fewer than a dozen — nurses, doctors and other health workers from the Seattle area who took time from their families and jobs to brave a virus that kills between 65 and 70 percent of its victims.
Those who went included Huster, a former Harborview Medical Center intensive-care trauma nurse, and Matthew Rollosson, 52, a Tacoma nurse and global-health expert also affiliated with Partners in Health.
The decision to volunteer was driven by sheer need, said Rollosson, who has worked in Africa before. As hard as it was to leave his job at the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, not to mention his wife and 2-year-old son, Rollosson said he felt compelled to help.
“With this epidemic, there’s a realization that this is an unprecedented event in modern history,” he said. “Epidemiologically, the way to contain this was to get people into a facility where they’re not infecting other people.”
Fear wasn’t a factor, Huster and Rollosson said. Though Ebola is deadly, the spread of the virus can be prevented with basic infection-control methods.
“It’s pretty standard infection control, maybe put on steroids,” Huster said. “You just pay extra attention.”
Both were experienced international travelers, with Huster previously working in Liberia, Syria and Lebanon, and Rollosson a veteran of stints in Ethiopia and Iran.
But shortages of basic equipment like chlorine bleach and long gloves made the task in Sierra Leone more dangerous. Wearing full-body, personal protective equipment, or PPE, in 100-degree heat and high humidity was difficult and uncomfortable. And there was no avoiding the utter misery that Ebola brings.
“It’s an ugly disease,” Rollosson said. “Most people don’t bleed, but there’s profuse diarrhea and vomiting and pain.”
Though they treated many sick people, both Huster and Rollosson said they have few detailed patient stories to share. When so many are so ill, the health workers are intensely concentrated on the next task in front of them, they said.
Still, horrific scenes became nearly routine, Huster said. Ebola orphans — babies and young children — lying abandoned on mattresses on concrete floors. A dying young nurse, bleeding from every orifice, covered in excrement. A 30-year-old man slumped in a lawn chair, dead. “He looked like a statue,” Huster recalled.
It wasn’t until she was heading back to the U.S. that the weight of such trauma caught up with her, Huster said.
“Everything just came in rushing,” she recalled, describing a torrent of emotions and images. “I called a friend in Seattle and said, ‘I’m not doing so well.’ “
Returning to the U.S. was a mixed experience, the health workers said. Screening at U.S. airports in New York and Washington, D.C., was extensive and time-consuming. And neither Huster nor Rollosson told seatmates on their flights to Seattle where they’d just been.
“You may be person of the year,” said Huster, referring to Time magazine’s 2014 cover honoring Ebola fighters, “but you’re sort of this pariah.”
Both Huster and Rollosson are under active surveillance by state health officials until 21 days after their last Ebola exposure. They’re among 43 travelers to West Africa currently being monitored in the state, said Donn Moyer, a public-health spokesman.
Rollosson, who came back in mid-December, is being tracked by his own Health Department colleagues, he said. For her part, Huster chafes against the twice-a-day reporting requirement.
“They’re a pain in my neck,” she said. “They would very much like me not to leave my house. If I am not sick, I have nothing to spread.”
They’ve been home for mere weeks, but Huster and Rollosson already are thinking about going back to Sierra Leone. It’s not an easy decision.
In Huster’s case, her children, Louis, 20, and Ella, 18, have objected to her travel.
“They say, ‘Don’t die, Mom,’ ” Huster recalled, only half-joking.
It’s Ella’s senior year of high school at Seattle Academy, and her mother’s been gone a lot, Louis told visitors. “Ella wants her mom here,” he said.
But Huster said she plans to return to West Africa, perhaps by the end of January.
“I want to go and I want to go again,” she said. “This is what I love to do. It’s pretty much who I am.”
Rollosson said he volunteered for Ebola duty in part out of concern for his family. First, the longer the epidemic rages in West Africa, he said, the greater the chance that it will spread to other parts of the world, including the U.S.
Second, and more important, is the message it sends to the world:
“I also wanted to set an example for my son, that doing this kind of work, doing work for other people, is something we should do,” he said.
