The Aimless Guide to Ebola 101: Oh Bejesus

While I am a licensed RN, this guide is not meant to be taken 100% seriously. It is in my usual style of embellishment and germaphobic paranoia commentary. Although, I probably do have a lot of good points as I have been obsessed with the Ebola outbreak since uhmmmm about April.

There are two trains of thought on the Ebola outbreak. They are as follows:

1. “There is one case of Ebola in the US and everyone is freaking out. Totally unnecessary. It is virtually impossible to get Ebola and we have the best health care in the world.”

2. “Oh my god I just coughed- I have Ebola, I’m dying.”

I am actually closer to the second train of thought, and let me tell you, when my ITP saga began and I was covered in bruises, I was like “hmmmmm spontaneous Ebola?” And I had a nurse from Ghana in the hospital who I heard in my anteroom (I was in an isolation room because that’s typically where you put people who may have blood cancer) very seriously questioning the night nurse over handoff about whether I could have Ebola.

Let’s start with an anecdote I just remembered that I find particularly disturbing. All of this mumbo jumbo about people screening people at airports…. seriously… when you were at an airport what was the last illegal thing you got through security? My mom was recently stopped after roughly 5 airports when they finally found an enormous wine bottle opener in her back. It took FIVE airport security checkpoints to find that. But that’s not the anecdote. Back in 2003, because I have the most extensive and ridiculous medical history on the planet and my mom didn’t vaccinate me as a kid, I contracted some weird random tropical viral pneumonia in St. Maarten. This was during the height of the SARS epidemic. By the time we went back to the US, I was so weak that I couldn’t even walk, I had like 103 fever, and was visibly sweating. Not only did I have to go through the entire airport in a wheelchair and be patted down by security because I couldn’t even walk through the metal detector, they had to wheel me out to the plane via golf cart and let me get on first. They were concerned I had SARS, but no one took my temperature, and they verbally asked me if I had SARS. My mom said I did not and that she was a doctor….. my mom is a chiropractor and if you read my ITP story you would know that my mom almost lead to my untimely death with her medical advice about vitamin C. In a nutshell- my mom knows nothing about microbiology, nor should she because she went to Chiropractic school in 1979, and chiropractors don’t deal with germs or medicine. No one asked to see my moms credentials. There have been numerous reports of people returning from Africa and not being adequately screened by the TSA.

Secondly, have you ever been to an emergency room? Or a hospital for that matter? Listen, modern medicine is amazing and medical professionals are amazing, but they’re not God, they’re human. They miss things. They make mistakes. A LOT OF MISTAKES. MISTAKES THAT KILL A LOT OF PEOPLE. The more people you interact with, the more mistakes they make. You heard about how the Ebola patient in Texas went to an emergency room and was not adequately screened about his travel history (and/or he lied like he did to customs), was given antibiotics, and sent home. Emergency rooms are for emergencies. Unless your vital signs are not stable and you’re bleeding excessively or having chest pain- no one cares why you are there for a fever. A fever of 102 is not going to kill you…. unless you have Ebola. But medical professionals look for common illnesses, not rare ones. I saw a case where a man went to the emergency room six times over six months (the same emergency room) complaining of back pain. He was given pain killers each time and sent home. Had anyone done an MRI or even an xray- they would have seen that he had cancer metastasized in his spine and all his bones…. which originated in his stomach. The ER is not the place to go for minor aches and pain. A general practitioner is the place to go, or a specialist, who will give you a proper workup. Unless you are imminently dying and need to be admitted, the ER is going to send you home without really investigating why you are sick. That is your job to figure out with your primary care doctor.

Also- have you ever met a patient- they are largely non-compliant or uninformed in general. Don’t you think someone like this first Ebola patient who KNEW he had been exposed to Ebola may have come to the United States SPECIFICALLY to seek treatment because this is the only place he had maybe a fighting chance to actually live through it? Because hellz no Liberia does not have a handle on it. What makes you think there aren’t other people just like that who will be unsymptomatic and lie their way through customs for survival? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs- survival comes before being moral and all of that good stuff. (Oh yeah, I will whip that out. Honor’s student forever. You can take the girl out of philosophy but you can’t take philosophy out of the girl. I iz so smart under all this steroid mania. PS- that’s why I’m writing about Ebola at 3am- because they gave me IV decadron today, obviously.)

Have you heard about health care in this country? Most people don’t have health insurance. Take it from someone who was unsure of her insurance and almost bled to death because of it. People who don’t have the money for medical care will either go to the emergency room- which is inappropriate for most minor illnesses in the first place- or they just won’t seek treatment. People coming in from Africa are not likely to have health insurance and unlikely to seek proper treatment until they are near death and have already infected many other people. Not to mention, have you ever met a man? Have you ever talked to a man? Men are the worst patients (second from nurses) because men generally try to play it tough and not divulge all of their symptoms and/or lie about them. AND many Americans and people in general are not health educated and don’t understand simple anatomy and physiology and are just not even in the position to understand how to prevent simple preventable health problems- ie Diabetes. Do you know how many people I’ve talked to that don’t know that canned soup is one of the unhealthiest things you can eat? Why does everything think soup is so healthy?! It is loaded with salt. Salt is terrible for you. If we can’t even control diabeetus- which is completely preventable, there are proven medications for, and diabetes CLINICS for the under insured, how do you think we’re going to control Ebola.

More importantly- didn’t two guys jump over the White House fence like last week? There are snipers all over the roof of the White House. Those guys have ONE JOB and they couldn’t even do that right. How do you think we’re going to keep Ebola out of the US? Because no virus from Africa has ever come to the US and killed millions of people before? Right? No, never. (eh hem, AIDS)

Please everyone, stop telling me that it is so hard to contract Ebola. If it is so hard… why are thousands of people getting it in Africa and why are most of them health care workers? Ok, I know the answer to this is that they don’t have proper medical supplies and that is completely true and relevant…. but why did the top SPECIALIST DOCTORS in Africa get it and die? Don’t you think they were wearing gloves? Hm? Also a nurse in Spain who took care of two missionaries from Africa with Ebola IN SPAIN (not third world country) just contracted Ebola in Spain. Don’t you think she and the other 29 nurses were wearing gloves?

Ebola is not airborne- uhm yeah, but it could be. Viruses are really good at mutating and that’s why the flu kills so many people every year. Regardless, one of the main causes of death in hospitals are- wait for it- HOSPITAL ACQUIRED INFECTIONS. Don’t you think hospitals try really hard to sanitize everything and keep everything sterile? Unfortunately, whenever you have sick people in a closed environment, germs spread. Hospitals are probably the dirtiest environments there are, regardless of stringent hand hygiene measures. And MANY of the most common hospital acquired infections are not airborne, they’re what you would consider contact precautions- spread through bodily fluids, just like Ebola. Ps- did you know you can get Herpes IN YOUR EYE? Oh you didn’t know that? Ok, then don’t try to tell me about Ebola because you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

Fun fact- Ebola can live on dried surfaces for several hours. Meaning if someone decided to wipe their Ebola laden sweaty forehead with their hand, and then touch a doorknob- you have Ebola on that doorknob. And then you come along and touch that doorknob, and now you have Ebola on your hand. And then you scratch your eye, or wipe your nose, or bite your fingernail- and you have Ebola in your mouth.

THESE ARE HOW INFECTIONS SPREAD, PEOPLE.

WASH YOUR HANDS AND DON’T TOUCH DOORKNOBS. *This is a legitimate solid RN fact and you can take this very seriously. I never touch doorknobs. Use a tissue or your sleeve if you have to, better yet use your elbow.

I just think people should be taking this seriously and be very cautious about infection transmission, whether it is just flu season or ebola season. To think that there will not be an outbreak of some sort in the United States is just really, really ignorant and wholly American in the worst way. We are not immune to Ebola, nor do we have the infrastructure in place to prevent it, OR the medical capacity to treat it. They left that family quarantined in that apartment with dirty sheets for 7 DAYS! That is wholly unbelievable. On oncology units you can’t even take dirty towels out of a patients room without it being in a hazmat bag because you don’t want any germs to spread to the hallway where it could potentially infect other patients who are made to walk around with masks on anyway. But leaving four people an in apartment with dirty Ebola sheets? Are you SERIOUS? More importantly, if more people get infected….. who do you think is going to clean up their homes at the cost of $185 an hour? Sure, one Ebola case and maybe the government will pick it up. But Hurricane Sandy happened two years ago and those funds still have not been wholly dispersed. Ebola is time sensitive.

Sidenote: I LOVE BLEACH. Even before I became a really immunocompromised person, I loved bleach. One day I bleached my bathroom (I took in a sick bunny that had fly strike and maggots and fly eggs all over it and cleaned it in my bathtub- which I then completely doused in bleach because EWWWWW) (sidenote: bunny did not make it. RIP bunny) and went to work the next day (waitressing) and everyone was like “Why do you smell like bleach?” I may or may not have destroyed a few brain cells.