Doctor who had Ebola, wife share struggle to survive

INDIANAPOLIS — On the first call, Kent Brantly told his wife, Amber, that he had fallen sick a few days after she and their children had left their home in Liberia for a trip to the United States. He had a fever and could not work the previous day, he said. But, he reassured her, he had been tested for Ebola and was negative.

A few days later, Kent called back: A second test showed he had Ebola.

Thousands of miles away, Amber felt powerless.

“I cried a lot; he was so matter of fact and calm,” she said. “All I could do was cry and tell him how sorry I was for him and to stay strong and keep fighting. ... I wanted to be there beside him and be there to bring him chicken soup and water.”

In a recent interview one year after Kent Brantly fell ill, the couple shared their memories of those days and the weeks that followed in which Brantly, a medical missionary and Indiana University School of Medicine alumnus, found himself in the media spotlight.

“Our lives became an international news story,” he said, something the couple had never suspected would happen when he signed on to spend two years working in the West African country as a medical missionary with Samaritan’s Purse. He, Amber, and their two small children had moved to Liberia about six months before the outbreak of Ebola.

The two wrote about their experiences in Called for Life: How Loving Our Neighbor Led Us into the Heart of the Ebola Epidemic, recently published by WaterBrook Press ($23).

After that experience, others might want never to return to medical mission work, but Kent and Amber, a registered nurse, say that the past year has only cemented their desire to do medical mission work, whether it be in Liberia or another country.

“This has been a whirlwind year of illness, recovery. We feel like we have been in a state of perpetual transition and we’re trying to get our bearings so we can go back to that kind of work,” Kent said.

Last month, the couple and their two children went back to Liberia for a week. They met with Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who thanked Brantly both for his service and his decision to return to the country. He graced the cover of Time magazine last year as one of the Ebola fighters considered “Person of the Year.”

Today, the Ebola outbreak continues in Sierra Leone and Guinea. While Liberia was pronounced disease-free earlier this spring, six new cases cropped up at the end of last month.

At the beginning of last year’s outbreak, hundreds of people fell ill and died. When Ebola first hit, the Brantlys discussed the possibility that one of them might contract the disease.

“I think one time, Amber told me, ‘If you get Ebola, I’m going to kill you,’ ” Kent said.

Neither of them felt particularly at risk. The hospital where Kent worked had strict protocols in its Ebola treatment unit to keep staff safe. He does not know for sure how he contracted the highly infectious disease; he suspects that may have occurred in the hospital’s emergency room, where the same equipment and protocols were not in place.

The first day that Kent felt sick, July 23, 2014, he hoped it was not Ebola. He waited a day to call Amber until that first test came back negative. He knew that a negative test early in the course of the illness was not definitive. In some cases, the virus in those first days is not replicating at a high enough level in the blood to be detected.

So he stayed in quarantine, until he was retested on July 26 and learned he did indeed have Ebola. Over the next few days, he stayed in regular touch with Amber.

On Aug. 1, a day after Kent received one dose of an experimental Ebola drug, ZMapp, he was evacuated to the United States. Originally he had said that the first dose could go to another ill American, Nancy Writebol. But when his condition deteriorated rapidly, he agreed to take it himself.

Amber flew to Atlanta to await him. As Kent’s plane landed, she sat in her hotel room, watching his arrival on television. She saw her husband walk from the ambulance into the hospital.

The television announcers speculated the man in the white protective suit was a decoy. Amber knew it was Kent.

“It was such a relief,” Amber said, “but it was an effort for you to put one step in front of the other. You barely made it.”

In an effort to avoid the media trucks in the front of the hospital, the ambulance had gone around to the back, where there were stairs. The paramedic, who knew Kent already had walked off the airplane steps, asked him whether he thought he could make this trip and he said “yes.”

For Kent, it was not a gesture of his strength but a practical decision.

“I was oblivious to the greater context of that situation,” he said. “That turned out to be an incredibly inspirational event for a lot of people who had been praying for me, that was an answer to so many prayers — that I was not only in America, I was strong enough to walk.”

Shortly after he arrived at the hospital, Kent’s condition declined again. But within a week, he knew he had turned a corner. For the first time in a fortnight, he had an appetite again.

On Aug. 20, after two negative blood tests, Kent was given the green light to exit the isolation unit and hug his wife.

“I hadn’t had any human contact that wasn’t coming through a gloved hand for four weeks, so to have that first contact be a hug from my wife, was really great,” he said.

Three days later, Kent and Amber flew to Indianapolis, where he was reunited with his children, ages 3 and 5, whom he hadn’t seen in more than a month and who had been staying with his parents.

The couple had discussed what would happen if one of them developed Ebola and died while in Liberia. They knew their remains would have to stay in Liberia because of the epidemic, Amber said. They each penned a letter to their parents, explaining that.

Their parents never saw those letters.