Ebola Doctor Speaks Out for 1st Time Since Leaving Hospital

The first and only person to be diagnosed with Ebola in New York City said in his first public comments since his recovery that he is grateful for the care he received and wants to bring attention to the frail health systems of countries still grappling with the deadly disease.

Dr. Craig Spencer, who was diagnosed in October and declared free of the virus in November, told WNYC he has considered a return to West Africa, where he treated Ebola patients with Doctors Without Borders, but going back wouldn’t be easy.

“Being unable to provide the type of care that I received would be very heavy, hard to come to terms with,” Spencer told WNYC.

Spencer recalled the close attention he received at Bellevue Hospital Center, where nurses brought him homemade food and he was given a banjo to pass the time. Lead physician Laura Evans set aside time to talk through his condition with him and provided an exercise bike so his muscles wouldn’t deteriorate while he was in isolation, he told WNYC.

“I felt a little unfair to receive all this attention – a bunch of other people trying to work so hard for my care when I didn’t feel that’s what the people I took care of had received,” Spencer said. “I’m incredibly thankful for that, but at the same time I feel like that’s unfair.”

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed thousands of people, but not many have been treated in the United States. Besides Spencer, those treated here include American health and aid workers and a journalist who fell ill in West Africa, a Liberian man diagnosed with the virus during a visit to Texas and two nurses who contracted it from him. The Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, died; the rest have recovered.

The 33-year-old Spencer said he knew his doctors were taking on the same risk that he had taken in treating patients in Guinea, so he tried to help them as much as he could throughout his treatment by cleaning up after himself or putting monitoring equipment on himself.

About 100 Bellevue staff members were involved in Spencer’s treatment. None were infected with the virus.

While the doctor says he now feels physically well, he knows life will never go back to normal.

“I know for the rest of my life people are going to ask me questions about my experience as a patient and my experience as a provider,” he said. 

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