I had intended the previous blog to be my final one. Knowing when to stop is a judgement call, but my last day in Moyamba felt like an appropriate time.

Harping on about the cold and consumerism on return is a sure way to generate stifled yawns. However two subsequent events have prompted me to continue for a little while longer. Two events that take me from joy to fear on this emotionally labile Ebola journey.

There was much happiness on my last morning in Moyamba with the announcement of our first survivor. Saffie was the older women admitted on our first day. With her age and her poor clinical state on admission her chances of survival seemed low.

Against considerable odds she clung on to life and escaped the dark stormy crossing of her illness. She would rally and then fade and we would fear the worse as she dropped back into semi-consciousness. One week to the day after we opened our Ebola centre she was well enough to consider a blood test. The result was returned the next morning and I could not have wished for a better farewell gift, a wonderful souvenir to cherish.

There are two exits from the red zone. The first is the mortuary exit, and half our patients will pass through this door on their way to safe burial. The second is the ‘happy door’ with a shower of chlorinated water and then the sweet freedom of the green zone.

Saffie exited through the happy door to pick up her life once more. She will continue to face adversity as she tries to integrate back into her village. Ebola survivors are stigmatised and shunned. Their community will fear them as carriers and be suspicious of their return.

Everything she owns will be burnt (clothes, blankets, mattresses) or decontaminated in a scorched earth approach to Ebola eradication. But she is alive, and the whole team is buzzing with excitement. This is what we have come here for: curing Ebola, one patient at a time.

I said my farewells and hit the Moyamba road back towards Freetown and the airport five hours away. There I was reunited with my NHS colleagues from Kerrytown and Port Loko. The team who had been sent to Emergency in Laka had ended up resigning over ethical concerns about the drugs and interventional approach being used there.

They had relocated to Kerrytown where they had settled well and felt they had been able to make a valuable contribution. The Port Loko team had been slow to open but had got there in the end, with a similar sense of accomplishment. Some were hoping to return, everyone was excited about going home.

Our Casablanca flight left a deserted Freetown airport at 02.30 and landed four sleepy hours later. We were greeted by men in biohazard suits shouting ‘stand back’ to us as we queued up for an infrared body scan. Then on to Heathrow where we had a more measured welcome from Public Health England.

There was a frisson of excitement in Border Control as 30 high risk Ebola contacts joined the queues for passport checks. Then in small groups we were whisked away for health checks and have our temperature measured. We all received a home-coming gift of biohazard bags, gloves, disinfectant and plastic scoops for any vomit and diarrhoea we may have. Public Health England are calm and professional.

Then home and a wonderful welcome from my family at the station. Cautious no-skin-contact hugs and a joyful home reunion. One of my daughters gives up her bedroom for my one degree of separation, but by the following afternoon I am becoming more laissez faire over my intended self-imposed isolation.

As we sit down in high spirits for our family Christmas dinner in the evening my daughter reads out from her phone that there has been a case of Ebola in Glasgow. Breaking news throws out small clues until it is clear who the individual is. What an awful shock.

I am worried for her - how terrifying it must be to wake up with a fever, knowing the consequences. Then the ambulance convoy and isolation pod flight to London. All alone with no one to hold your hand.

I am also worried for myself and my family. I have become blasé about the risk of infection during my stay in Sierra Leone. Now I am in my safe European home and already feel that I am immune, although I still have my nearly three weeks before I am released from my quarantine parole.

This case brings the risk starkly home to me and planned trips to the cinema, a rapid return to work and perhaps even a New Year’s Eve get-together are all quickly postponed. I distribute my returned stock of alcohol gel bottles to my family and we agree to revert to a no-touch policy.

The risk of transmission is negligible but they will be the ones most at risk if I do develop symptoms, so it’s important we take precautions.

They are alarmed but sensible, however it is the wider reception of fate news that worried me. A case of Ebola in the first wave of returning NHS volunteers will amplify fear and prejudice. The scare-mongering newspaper headlines are already screaming out.

Public Health England quickly establishes contact me for daily monitoring. I will phone in my temperatures twice a day and notify them immediately if I develop any symptoms. They are helpful and supportive and it is comforting to know they are with me.

My wife suggests I shave my beard to be less identifiable in public when we go out. Maybe some plastic surgery, though I am banned from any interventional procedures for now.

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