Dr. Craig Spencer, New York’s first and to date only Ebola patient, said in an essay published on Wednesday that he was falsely accused of putting the public at risk and was superficially depicted as “a fraud, a hipster and a hero” after he was hospitalized last fall.
“The truth is, I am none of those things,” Dr. Spencer wrote in a personal but also polemical essay published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. He added: “I’m just someone who answered a call for help and was lucky enough to survive.”
The essay is one of the first times he has given a detailed public accounting of the course of his illness and how it affected him, physically and psychologically. He also recently gave an interview to WNYC radio.
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Despite the risks and hardships, Dr. Spencer wrote, treating Ebola patients was cathartic. “Every day, I looked forward to putting on the personal protective equipment and entering the treatment center,” he wrote. “No matter how exhausted I felt when I woke up, an hour of profuse sweating in the suit and the satisfaction I got from treating ill patients washed away my fear and made me feel new again.”
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