"I feel sorry for the poor patients who have these alien-type people caring for them," said Pauline Cafferkey in the diary she sent from the Ebola treatment centre where she volunteered in Sierra Leone.
Young children, in particular, she noted, not only have to cope with being very sick but also with these "strange creatures" giving them medication while entirely encased in protective clothing.
Now she is being looked after by staff dressed in hats, sleeves and gloves that are built into the screen of the isolation unit which surrounds her at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Ms Cafferkey, 39, usually works as an associate public health nurse at Blantyre Health Centre in South Lanarkshire. But inspired to become a nurse by TV images of the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, she also felt compelled to join Save the Children in their efforts to help those hit by the West African Ebola outbreak. She started work at the Kerry Town Ebola Treatment Centre on November 23.
Two weeks in, she described the PPE (personal protective equipment) which staff have to wear before entering the Red Zone where the infected are treated as "horrendous". In her diary, published in a Sunday newspaper, she wrote: "It takes about 20 minutes to dress and 15 minutes to take the suit off at the other end. They would certainly be beneficial on a cold winter's night in Scotland but working in them in 30-degree heat is uncomfortable to say the least. On the up side, I feel very well protected."
During the month she spent at the centre, she saw children orphaned by the disease which has claimed 7500 lives in the last year.
Reflecting on a particularly hard day, she wrote: "I was with a lady who was dying. I could tell she didn't have long, so I was trying to make her comfortable. There was a young boy standing at the window looking in and I waved to him. A few minutes later she had passed away and I heard the boy crying outside the ward. When I went to him, he asked if she had died. I said yes. He said she was his mother. He had already lost his father to Ebola, and now he had no parents. I tried to console him, and he said he has a sister who also came to the treatment centre with him and his mother, but he did not know where she was. A young girl had died that morning."
But there were also more uplifting moments, which helped keep her and her fellow workers going.
When patients manage to shake the virus and are well enough to go home they go to the "happy shower" for their last chlorine wash, leave all their personal belongings for incineration and collect new clothes. Ms Cafferkey wrote: "They are then able to leave the Red Zone for the outside world, where they are greeted by the local staff singing and dancing in celebration. They are given a discharge pack that includes money and food. One particularly nice discharge was a brother and sister. There were lots of smiles, and they were fortunate to have a mother and father to take them home, which is not often the case. I see the discharge process as a very important part of letting the survivor know how special they are, and it helps in building community confidence. Not only that, but it does wonders for staff morale, as some of the things we see inside the gates are very unpleasant. It helps us remember the good work we are doing and the reason we are all here."
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