A nurse of 16 years, Pauline Cafferkey was inspired to become a health worker after watching TV footage of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s.
And when the NHS appealed for volunteers to help treat Ebola patients in west Africa, the 39-year-old community nurse at Blantyre health centre in South Lanarkshire immediately put herself forward.
“For me, it was kind of a natural thing; I couldn’t think of any reason not to go,” she told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland a day before flying to Sierra Leone.
Asked by the BBC interviewer whether she felt excited, nervous or worried about her trip, Cafferkey replied: “Everything. All of the above. An awful lot of emotions I’m going through just now. I’m looking forward to getting there, getting my feet on the ground and getting stuck into it.”
She said she hoped her family would be proud of her – even if they were worried about her catching the virus. “You’ve got to have a certain element of fear there. You don’t want to go into this being complacent.”
Dr Martin Deahl, a fellow volunteer who sat next to Cafferkey on the return flight to Heathrow, said she seemed “absolutely fine”. He spoke fondly of the nurse he got to know during 10 days of precautionary training in York before they were dispatched to different treatment centres in Sierra Leone. “She was quiet, unassuming, terribly committed to what she was doing, just a normal nurse,” he said.
Deahl said he had attended a church service on Christmas Day and that Cafferkey was likely to have contracted the disease while visiting the local community without wearing a full hazard suit.
While in Sierra Leone, she worked at Kerry Town treatment centre, one of the busiest makeshift hospitals in the country. The 80-bed facility has treated more than 200 patients since opening on 5 November, according to Save the Children, and has cured 66 people.
In a moving diary for the Scotsman, Cafferkey told how she found the experience mentally and physically exhausting, at one point vomiting out of a minibus window and having dreams about the virus. “My nice community-nursing job in Blantyre is far removed from this but at the moment this seems a lot more real. The dreams that I do remember always seem to have an Ebola theme, it seems to be all consuming,” she wrote.
Her time there did not get any easier. By the third week, Cafferkey described how she consoled a distraught boy who had lost both his parents and his sister to Ebola. “The sad thing is that this is a regular occurrence and we see and hear of whole families being wiped out by this awful disease,” she said.
Cafferkey, who is thought to live with her parents Jean and Michael in a cul-de-sac in Fife, wrote about how she felt fortunate to have a few hours of electricity and cold running water in the coastal shack that housed the volunteers. “This is basic stuff but I’m not here for a holiday. Being coastal, we are very fortunate to get to walk along a beautiful beach every day to get to the hotel that serves our food,” she said. “Although I don’t get to see a great deal of Sierra Leone, from the journey to work and the area surrounding where we are staying, I can tell it is a country of immense natural beauty. Not only that, but we pass a small mangrove with crocodiles every day, not your average walk to work.”