Fatu Kekula is a hero! What?!!! She
is caring for four of her family members with Ebola, keeping 3 alive without
infecting herself.
She deserves a place in the stars!
Read her inspiring story below as told by CNN below:
It can be exhausting nursing a child through a nasty bout with the flu, so imagine how 22-year-old Fatu Kekula felt nursing her entire family through Ebola.
Read her inspiring story below as told by CNN below:
It can be exhausting nursing a child through a nasty bout with the flu, so imagine how 22-year-old Fatu Kekula felt nursing her entire family through Ebola.
Her father. Her mother. Her sister.
Her cousin. Fatu took care of them all, single-handedly feeding them, cleaning
them and giving them medications.
And she did so with remarkable
success. Three out of her four patients survived. That’s a 25% death rate —
considerably better than the estimated Ebola death rate of 70%.
Fatu stayed healthy, which is
noteworthy considering that more than 300 health care workers have become
infected with Ebola, and she didn’t even have personal protection equipment —
those white space suits and goggles used in Ebola treatment units.
This team picks up Ebola’s dead
Desperation grows in heart of Ebola
zone
Instead Fatu, who’s in her final
year of nursing school, invented her own equipment. International aid workers
heard about Fatu’s “trash bag method” and are now teaching it to other West
Africans who can’t get into hospitals and don’t have protective gear of their
own.
Every day, several times a day for
about two weeks, Fatu put trash bags over her socks and tied them in a knot
over her calves. Then she put on a pair of rubber boots and then another set of
trash bags over the boots.
She wrapped her hair in a pair of
stockings and over that a trash bag. Next she donned a raincoat and four
pairs of gloves on each hand, followed by a mask.
It was an arduous and time-consuming
process, but Fatu was religious about it, never cutting corners.
UNICEF Spokeswoman Sarah Crowe said
Fatu is amazing.
“Essentially this is a tale of how
communities are doing things for themselves,” Crowe said.
“Our approach is to
listen and work with communities and help them do the best they can with what
they have.”
She emphasized, of course, that it
would be better for patients to be in real hospitals with doctors and nurses in
protective gear — it’s just that those things aren’t available to many West
Africans.
No one knows that better than Fatu.
Her Ebola nightmare started Juy 27,
when her father, Moses, had a spike in blood pressure. She took him to a
hospital in their home city of Kakata.
A bed was free because a patient had
just passed away. What no one realized at the time was that the patient had
died of Ebola.
Moses, 52, developed a fever,
vomiting and diarrhea. Then the hospital closed down because nurses started
dying of Ebola.
Fatu took her father to Monrovia,
the capital city, about a 90-minute drive via difficult roads. Three hospitals
turned him away because they were full.
She took him back to another
hospital in Kakata. They said he had typhoid fever and did little for him, so
Fatu took him home, where he infected three other family members: Fatu’s
mother, Victoria, 57; Fatu’s sister, Vivian, 28, and their 14-year-old cousin
who was living with them, Alfred Winnie.
While operating her one-woman Ebola
hospital for two weeks, Fatu consulted with their family doctor, who would talk
to her on the phone, but wouldn’t come to the house. She gave them medicines
she obtained from the local clinic and fluids through intravenous lines that
she started.
At times, her patients’ blood
pressure plummeted so low she feared they would die.
“I cried many times,” she said. “I
said ‘God, you want to tell me I’m going to lose my entire family?’ “
But her father, mother, and sister
rallied and were well on their way to recovery when space became available at
JFK Medical Center on August 17. Alfred never recovered, though, and passed
away at the hospital the next day.
“I’m very, very proud,” her father
said. “She saved my life through the almighty God.”
Now he’s working to find a scholarship
for Fatu so she can finish her final year of nursing school. He has no doubt
his daughter will go on to save many more people during her life.
“I’m sure she’ll be a great giant of
Liberia,” he said.
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