The first person I ever met with Ebola was a boy named James.
He was five years old.
And he had a red fire truck that he played with.
And he looked completely normal.
And that scared me to death.
He despised me.
And he despised my team of nurses, physicians,
social workers, nutritionists, cleaners
who had gone to Sierra Leone to treat patients with Ebola.
He hated us because we wore these white and yellow suits,
zipped up, sealed up, where the only humanity that you
could see were our eyes behind a plastic face shield.
Inside of the suits, it was like being in a veritable sauna.
The temperature inside of the suit
was between 110 and 130 degrees.
So as soon as we put them on, our face masks fogged up.
And we were walking, stumbling, through the fog of Ebola.
My job was to stick James with needles, to hydrate him,
and to try to save his life.
Now, when I was preparing to go work with Ebola patients,
I was reading the media.
I read Richard Preston's Hot Zone, great work of fiction,
by the way.
And I was scared to death of the blood and the dying.
This was zombie apocalypse, according to the media.
And so when I saw James and he looked completely normal,
I didn't know how to respond.
This kid had the world's worst virus inside of him.
And he just glowered at me as I tried
to stick him with a needle.
About a week later, on January 1st 2015, I met Isatu.
Isatu two was three years old.
And she did not look normal.
She came to us in the back of an ambulance.
We sprayed down the doors of the ambulance.
And we were in our white scary suits.
So we open the door.
And laying on the floor of the ambulance
was this three-year-old child all by herself, barely
breathing.
She was covered in diarrhea.
She was covered in vomit.
I didn't think she was going to live longer than the time it
would take to triage her and get her into our unit
because our new normal, working in the Ebola crisis,
was the fact that, for children under five, only 20% survived.
Of every 10 children we treated, 8 died.
So when we saw Isatu, we had no hope.
We pulled her out of the ambulance.
And our team of physicians and nurses
worked with her to try to start hydrating her.
And in the moment that I pulled out
the IV to start the line on her, I had a dose of hope.
You know why?
Because she kicked me in the stomach.
She saw that needle.
And she literally, boom, right there in my stomach.
She had elbowed the doctor that was leaning over,
trying to hold her still.
She fought like hell to prevent us from sticking her
with the needle.
And in that moment, she looked like a completely normal
three-year-old child.
And I felt hope.
And I was thrilled.
We got that line going.
We fought like hell to get that line on board.
We got the fluids onboard.
Three precarious days passed, but Isatu
started to get better.
Five days passed, and she started walking again.
She started acting normal.
She started playing.
We would go into the unit.
And we were fogged and exhausted and treating as many kids
as we could before we had to leave because of exhaustion.
And we go in the unit, and then this would happen.
And I'd look down, right, and there would be
a Isatu wrapped around my leg.
And so I tried to treat as many kids as I could.
And then when I couldn't do anymore,
I would have to peel her off.
And sometimes it would take two or three providers
to peel her off my leg.
So she could go play with other kids.
Ebola is a weird disease.
It surprised us all the time.
And it's really messed up disease.
And one of the most messed up things as a pediatric emergency
nurse was most of the kids that we treated that died
had a great day the day before they died.
They were sitting up.
They were playing.
They were asking for food and snacks.
They were throwing things at us.
We were throwing things back gently.
And so that day that we peeled Isatu off my leg,
I was so overjoyed that she was going to make it.
I didn't think to myself, oh crap.
This is her good day.
And it was.
My buddy, Paul, he was a PICU nurse.
And we were rounding on the kids.
We had seen Isatu.
We peeled her off.
And we were treating all these other kids.
And on the way out of the unit, we had been in these suits
for about two hours.
I could hardly see anything.
Paul yelled to me, and he said, Tim, we have a problem.
And he was standing next to Isatu.
And so I walked over.
And from a distance, it just looked
like she was taking a nap.
But as we got closer, we saw this.
Her entire body was shaking.
She was seizing from head to toe.
We called for help.
Other team members came in, brought enough Valium
to kill me and you together.
But we couldn't stop her seizures.
For eight hours, off and on, she seized.
And when she stopped seizing, she stopped moving.
Her eyes were closed.
But she kept on breathing.
The next day, she was laying there, didn't move again.
But she kept on breathing.
The third day, she was still breathing.
Our job working with Isatu after that point
was to clean her and prepare her body
for the most beautiful funeral we could offer her because it
was the least we could do.
And my job that one day, three days after the seizures, was I
was wiping her face down, cleaning her off.
It was hot there.
She was sweating.
And I had a washcloth.
And I pulled it across her face.
And then I was coming over, she did this.
And I thought I was hallucinating
because I was hypoglycemic and exhausted
and sad and heartbroken.
And I had all these emotions going on.
So I wiped her face again.
And she took that washcloth in her mouth,
and she sucked it dry.
She was not ready to die.
So we started hydrating her.
She started to move again.
She started to roll again.
She got stronger.
She got better.
But she had a long road to recovery.
Here's the problem.
Ebola shut down every health system
in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea.
If you wanted to get cured of Ebola,
you probably had to fly to another country.
So we knew that, even though Isatu was doing better,
there were no health facilities that could maintain her care
and re-nourish her and give her the 24 hours of care
that she needed.
She needed a family.
Now, remember, when Isatu came to us
in the back of the ambulance and it was empty,
our first assumption was mom and dad are already dead,
which usually was the correct assumption.
We had called to her village.
We had reached out, nothing.
So as Isatu was getting better and we were all
falling in love with her, one of our social workers from Sierra
Leone broke policies, stole one of our motorbikes
that we were using to transport patients.
And he went to her village because he
wasn't going to give up.
And he went door-to-door, home-to-home, asking people
if they knew Isatu.
He finally met this young man.
He was 21, 22-years-old.
And he said, we have a girl--
or no, he asked, if you know anyone named Isatu.
And the man said, I had a daughter.
She was my first.
She died three weeks ago in an Ebola treatment unit.
And the social worker put [? him ?]
on the back of his motorbike.
He said, where's your wife?
They found his wife, put them back.
They rode for two or three hours.
And they drove straight to our Ebola treatment unit.
And I was the lucky one who was on shift that day
who got to clean Isatu the last time and carry her to her mom.
Around about Valentine's Day, a few days
before I was going to fly home to my, then, home in New York
City, where I was going to sit in quarantine for 21 days,
I had the opportunity to visit Isatu.
And I went to where she was staying.
Her grandmother was taking care of her.
And I started to talk with her grandmother--
[LAUGHTER]
And as her grandmother gently peeled her off my leg--
it was easy to peel her off at this point--
her desire to play was as strong as I had seen.
But she was still a little bit weak.
I thought about that social worker
who broke policy to go one last time into the village.
And then I thought about our team, our entire team
of medical professionals from Cuba, Canada, the UK, the US,
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria.
We were Muslims.
We were Christians.
We were Jewish.
We were Buddhists.
We were atheists.
We were special ops soldiers, and we were pacifists.
We were liberal.
We were conservative.
We were reactionary.
We were radical.
And at night, over tears, we would debrief our day.
And we would discuss and argue about all
these political beliefs.
But in the mornings, we had one sole focus.
And that was to save lives.
So maybe you think that we did this work.
And in doing this work, we built bridges.
If you do think that, I'd be honored.
Ultimately, we just showed up.
[APPLAUSE]