(NYT) Dr. Spencer is an emergency doctor and professor at Brown. He survived Ebola in 2014 after treating patients in Guinea and recently treated Covid-19 patients in New York City. I’m often asked what it felt like to have Ebola. Eight years later, I still struggle to respond. But the truth is that having Ebola felt like guilt. Guilt for getting a diagnosis only hours after entering a hospital in New York, knowing my patients in Guinea waited in limbo for days or longer. Guilt for having so many providers care for me while remembering the dozens of patients I frantically treated simultaneously back in West Africa. Guilt for feeling helpless as my patients died, the worst possible feeling for any doctor.
In the initial days of my illness, I perseverated on my mortality — an understandable fixation, given the high probability I wouldn’t survive. But when it was clear I would beat the odds (as many treated in the United States ultimately did), I remember feeling solace thinking I’d never have to experience the sadness and despair I saw in those hastily erected hospitals in Guinea in 2014. Surely the world would never be this unprepared again.