22-Year-Old Single-Handedly Saves Father, Mother And Sister From Ebola In Her Home

Her father, mother, sister and cousin all contracted the deadly virus and, to her horror, local hospitals refused to take them in. “No one came near me. No one! I were all alone, all alone,” she said.

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About a week earlier, Moses had been diagnosed with typhoid and given a bed that had just been vacated by an Ebola patient in the clinic where he worked. His wife, Victoria, sent her four youngest foster children away and did her best to care for him, but when he weakened dramatically, with vomiting and diarrhea, she called Fatu home.

Fatu and her sister, Vivienne, took Moses by taxi, 90 minutes on punishing roads, to Monrovia, but no Ebola treatment unit could take him. On the ride back, Fatu made her plan. “Since I know small, small medicine, I said, ‘God, with my faith I’m going to get my father home, and he’ll survive.’”

Fatu stayed healthy, which is noteworthy considering that more than 300 health care workers have become infected with Ebola, and she didn't even have personal protection equipment -- those white space suits and goggles used in Ebola treatment units.

Instead Fatu, who's in her final year of nursing school, invented her own equipment. International aid workers heard about Fatu's "trash bag method" and are now teaching it to other West Africans who can't get into hospitals and don't have protective gear of their own.

When she entered her father’s treatment room she put on socks, plastic bags donned like waders, rain boots, four sets of gloves, a coat, a mask and a plastic bag over her hair. He wouldn’t eat. Carefully, she put in an intravenous drip. She poured rehydration liquids down his throat, drop by drop.

She gave him blood pressure medicine, antibiotics, analgesics for his fever and splitting headache. She even gave him an antiretroviral medicine normally used to save the lives of AIDS patients. “He was restless. I did his blood pressure and it was very low, and I was afraid that he might die,” she said. Moses Kekula was struggling to breathe, with a shattering headache, aches all over his body.

Every day, several times a day for about two weeks, Fatu put trash bags over her socks and tied them in a knot over her calves. Then she put on a pair of rubber boots and then another set of trash bags over the boots. She wrapped her hair in a pair of stockings and over that a trash bag. Next she donned a raincoat and four pairs of gloves on each hand, followed by a mask.

"Essentially this is a tale of how communities are doing things for themselves," Crowe said. "Our approach is to listen and work with communities and help them do the best they can with what they have."

She emphasized, of course, that it would be better for patients to be in real hospitals with doctors and nurses in protective gear -- it's just that those things aren't available to many West Africans. No one knows that better than Fatu.

She gave them medicines she obtained from the local clinic and fluids through intravenous lines that she started. At times, her patients' blood pressure plummeted so low she feared they would die.

Around the clock, one or the other of them would be weakly calling Fatu for help. She dozed 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there. “It was a bit difficult for me to sleep because all the time they would call me, maybe two of them would call me at the same time. Every time I would go into a dangerous room, I would dress up,” she said.

"I cried many times," she said. "I said 'God, you want to tell me I'm going to lose my entire family?' "

“The whole virus thing, it’s like carrying a baby in your hands, because it turns them into a child. You have to be sorry for them. You have to put yourself into the shoes of that person and ask yourself, ‘What if it were me?’”

“My approach was just to treat them based on their symptoms. I never felt tired. I was fighting for my family and their lives. I would do it for other people in the hospital so I knew I could do it for my family.” On the 18th day, as Alfred's condition swiftly declined, an ambulance arrived. She watched it depart with her family members, fear gripping her heart. Would she see them again?

“I was worried. I worried a lot because my entire family went there. They had the symptoms of the virus, and the virus had no cure.” She prayed as hard as she could that their Ebola tests would be negative. All would come back positive. Outside John F. Kennedy Medical Center, Alfred collapsed, convulsing.

“He said, ‘Aunty, I want to lie down,’” Victoria said. There were no beds inside, so Moses, Victoria, Vivienne and Alfred were given mattresses lined up next to each on the floor. Alfred’s skin became hot, he started bleeding from his mouth, convulsing again. When Victoria awoke the next morning at 5, she saw Alfred, her foster child, just a yard away on the next mattress, drenched in blood from his head.

"I was afraid to touch him," she said. "Then I saw he wasn’t breathing. “I cried. I said ‘It’s a shame on me, because I took somebody’s child, a relative’s child, and he died in my hands.’” Victoria’s health declined sharply, she began ranting unintelligibly, her skin broke out in a rash. But she would ultimately survive.

“I’m going to teach them the things I’ve already done, because I treated four people, and only one died,” she said.

Now he's working to find a scholarship for Fatu so she can finish her final year of nursing school. He has no doubt his daughter will go on to save many more people during her life.