Liberian nursing assistant Salome Karwah was not one of the
survivors of the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak that killed almost 11,310.
The disease that tore through her town in August of that year took her mother,
her father, her brother, aunts, uncles, cousins and a niece. But by some
miracle it left Karwah, her sister Josephine Manley and her fiancé James Harris
still alive.
Karwah
used to joke that survivors had “super powers” because after overcoming the
disease they were forever immune from it. Like any superhero, she often quipped,
it was her moral duty to use those powers for the betterment of humankind. So
as soon as she recovered, she returned to the hospital where she had been
treated the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Ebola treatment unit just outside of
the capital, Monrovia to help other patients.
Not only did she understand what they were going through, she
was one of the rare people who could comfort the sick with hands-on touch. She
could spoon-feed elderly sufferers, and rock feverish babies to sleep.
In
November 2014, she, her fiancée, and her sister were already planning to
re-open the family medical clinic that had been forced to close when her
father, the local doctor, succumbed to Ebola. She envisioned a kind of
super-clinic, whose survivor nurses would able to go where other medical
personnel feared to tread because of their immunity. “I can do things that
other people can’t,” she said then. “If an Ebola patient is in his house, and
his immediate relative cannot go to him, I can go to him. I can take care of
him.”
Her
determination to help Ebola patients when most of the world fled in fear had put
her among the Ebola Fighters who were named TIME Magazine’s Person of the
Year in 2014.
When
the outbreak in Liberia ended, and people could have a party without fear of
catching the virus, she finally married her fiancé, changed her name to Salome
Harris, and had her third child. She picked the name Destiny. Then she got
pregnant again. On Feb. 17 she delivered a healthy boy, Solomon, by cesarian
section and was discharged from hospital three days later.
Within
hours of coming home, Karwah lapsed into convulsions. Her husband and her
sister rushed her back to the hospital, but no one would touch her. Her foaming
mouth and violent seizures panicked the staff. They didn’t want contact with
her fluids. They all gave her distance. No one would give her an injection.
Karwah
died the next day. Manley doesn’t know what caused the convulsions, but
believes that something went wrong in the surgery. Still, she says, if her
sister had been treated immediately, she might have had a chance. Instead, “she
was stigmatized.”
News
of Karwah’s death rippled far beyond her small community in Liberia. Those who
knew her for her tireless cheer in the MSF Ebola treatment clinic were
devastated. “To survive Ebola and then die in the larger yet silent epidemic of
health system failure… I have no words,” says Ella Watson-Stryker, a MSF health
promoter who worked with Karwah in Liberia and was also among the Ebola
Fighters on the 2014 cover.
my opinion
this is heart breaking, she helped others but nobody helped her. she was not an ebola patient yet they stigmatized her thinking she might have ebola. if the hospital is well equipped, they should have been able to carry out test instead they left her to her death. what a pity
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