The brave Bay State doctor stricken with Ebola in his beloved “adopted second home” of Liberia said he’d go back again as he described his harrowing ordeal and how he fell ill with the deadly virus that’s plaguing West Africa.
“We love the people of Liberia,” a tired, but chipper Dr. Richard Sacra said yesterday at UMass Medical Center in Worcester. “It’s an affiliation that God has put in our hearts. I think the odds of my ending up back there are pretty high. I don’t have any specific plans, but that’s where my heart is.”
Sacra, a married father of three who lives in Holden, said he returned to ELWA Hospital in Monrovia Aug. 3 after his friend, Dr. Kent Brantly, fell sick with Ebola.
None of the capital’s hospitals were open, Sacra said, because workers were battling Ebola and many had died. Pregnant women in need of C-sections had nowhere to go, Sacra said, and children with Malaria and pneumonia were dying at home.
“When I learned of these conditions,” Sacra said, “I knew it was imperative that our hospital reopen as soon as possible.”
Over the next three weeks, the hospital staff treated pregnant patients. Many of them had been in labor for up to 10 days, Sacra said, and had tried to deliver their babies at other facilities, sometimes using “forceful abdominal pressure, even the cutting of episiotomies, without successfully delivering.”
Many of the women were ill, had fevers, were bleeding and vomiting, Sacra said, and many of their babies had already died in the uterus.
“It was difficult to determine which of them might have had Ebola virus disease,” said Sacra, who said the hospital performed over 35 C-sections.
The doctor believes he was exposed to the harrowing virus while caring for one of the “very-ill pregnant women.”
On Aug. 29, he said he came down with a fever and on Sept. 1 a blood test showed he had
Ebola. A few days later, Sacra said, an air ambulance took him to Nebraska, where he received experimental medication and “plasma full of anti-Ebola anti-bodies” from Brantly.
“I thank God to be home and to be well,” Sacra said, his wife of 29 years, Debbie, sitting next to him.
“Of course I was concerned that I might die, there’s the human side of you that’s afraid,” Sacra said. “I had also thought this through before going and had kind of counted the cost in my own mind a little bit and knew that this was a possibility.”
Sacra returned home Thursday. He’s feeling very tired and his legs are wobbly. Said his wife: “It’s just great to have Dad home.”