Q: Can you tell me about the day you described and you went, you got out, you took your PPE off, and then you went to the clean room? What happened when you got there?

JWK: We would always be dressed up in our PPE. So, when we get to the patient, they wouldn’t be able to recognize who’s in the PPE but we can recognize them. I think one of the things that was really killing our patients from the beginning was the psychosocial aspect.

Q: Can you talk more about that?

JWK: Yes. If you’re in a hospital, you are not seeing anyone. Only people dressed in masks come to you. That alone, psychologically, I mean it impairs our healing. And then there’s your contact from the relatives. We didn’t have a land phone.

Q: Didn’t have a—

JWK: Land phone, a unit phone. If we had a unit phone, then we could give the phone numbers to each relative, every part of your family. Even if you had the infectious disease, every part of your family could contact you. They would say “You’ve got to be there for me. You’ve got to hold on. We need you.”

Q: As time went on, did you see more people surviving?

JWK: We used to help when JFK decided to start one of the first ETUs. When the first case came to JFK for redemption with a doctor and the nurse one day a year. From there, they decided to put it on the slow then open a bigger unit at the ETU. So, we had a few of our colleagues and doctors who got infected when we were working at JFK. They used to go into there. Ah! This situation was so traumatizing. Because if you go in, like the day I can never forget, when we went in, our late doctor, Dr. Abraham Bobo, he took off his rings. He told us, “Tell my wife to be strong.” Yes. He said, “Tell my wife to be strong.” I mean, I’m going slowly. This is a person who always used to mentor us, give us advice in JFK, telling us that, “Ah, you guys need to take precaution.” I mean, seeing him get infected and into the ETU, that was so horrible for us. It was so horrible. At that time, during the infection rate, lots and lots of people died, even at Cartley Hospital. We had so many of our friends, one of which was Loraine. She was my friend. Kayba Zhoul, Lason, these were all good, good friends—

Q: Yes, I saw the pictures.

JWK: who died from this virus. During that time, when they died, you had a lot of people dying because we didn’t have all the measures at that time. Education was kind of—it was not shifting down. It was not shifting down.

Q: So, you were encouraging each other, creating this network or this team.

JWK: Because tell me, if we backed off, no one would come forward to go and help. And if you’re looking at caring for a patient, everything lies in the hands of nurses. Everything lies in the hands of nurses. Imagine the amount of doctors we had. I’m telling you that these four doctors were like an army for more survivors, these doctors. And I can say it to anybody because these are doctors who would enter ETU with the nurses, buck off the work. Ebola stopped first because number one, because God decided to stop the pestilence he put on us. And two, the force from the nursing work, from nursing and midwife workforce. Because if it were only doctors we were depending on to go into ETU, trust me, by this time we’d still be into Ebola. But the nursing and midwifery workforce, they were the heroes and heroines behind the fighting of Ebola.

Q: Any time along the way, did you feel silenced from telling your story? Or did you feel like you could talk about what had happened, and your experience as a nurse?

JWK: Sometimes I just don’t want to tell people I was in the Ebola fight. And again, sometimes I want to talk about it because I’m proud to be an infectious disease nurse. I can say for once that I was able to be a model to fight Ebola. And again, I want people to know that Ebola is still around. So, we still have to concern ourselves. If you start to talk up your story it brings up—it will bring up fear and people will start to take the necessary precautions. So sometimes I really want to talk about it because it reminds us not to forget that we were hit and we can still be hit again in the future. All we need is a proper system, monitoring, evaluation. We must be able to track. We know this. And the sad thing about Ebola, it has so many things. The signs and symptoms are not directly fixed to a specific illness. Malaria is a prevalent illness and carries all Ebola symptoms. So, we just have to ask questions, those minimal questions. Have you traveled in recent times? Did you attend any burial of any unusual death? We need to ask these questions. Then we can be able to have a clue. We’re still not—I mean we’re still not—we don’t need to forget about those things that we said.

Q: What helped you to keep going?

JWK: We had a team built up. We already knew each other. We already had this working relationship. Seeing ourselves in an infectious area, it’s like, I need to watch your back. You need to watch my back. Because one man goes down, everyone goes down. That was a team effort. That kept me going, kept me encouraged. From the beginning, it was discouraging because if you’re in a high-risk area, and we had some challenges with salary as usual. But when our colleagues come into this area, they didn’t come here because of the hundred dollars our ministry will pay them. You can’t buy your life with five hundred or a hundred dollars. So, you came here to give care. You must encourage yourself first, forget about how much you’re going to get, and make sure that you came here for a reason and for a purpose. Your desire is to make sure that our family in the ETU should be putting out with our care. So that was the resilient force that we had that kept us going.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

JWK: We can only have it when the health ministry enforces action and gives strength to our Ebola nurses. They need to recognize that we nurses are the arm behind a good health system and understand that nurses need to be prioritized in this country. A nursing force needs to be as strong as any other thing. If you go to other countries, the people prioritize the nurses. Because we spent more time in all our efforts behind patient care than a doctor. A doctor comes and they prescribe and he or she goes. But when you talk about how the patient gets out, we know other takes the glory. But if we don’t prescribe, I will not carry out my function. If I’m not there too, whatever you prescribe, your prescription won’t be carried out. If you look at prescription and care, like sixty percent of the work is left with nursing and midwifery. But forty percent is then with our physician. So, all we need to do is to put in more time, provide those requisite materials for the nurses to work with.

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Julia W. Kamara was interviewed for Frontline Nurses by Susan Michaels-Strasser on August 16, 2019 in Monrovia, Liberia.

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