WORCESTER, Mass. — At this time last year, Dr. Rick Sacra was given a second chance at life.
On Sept. 25, 2014, the 52-year-old Massachusetts physician had just been discharged from an Omaha, Nebraska, hospital after being treated and cured of Ebola.
Sacra had contracted the deadly virus while delivering babies in a Christian mission hospital in Liberia. Rushed back to the U.S., he spent three weeks suffering through fevers, vomiting, diarrhea and aches.
Sacra said his faith gave him peace through the uncertainty.
“Of course I knew that I might die,” he said. “It made me very aware of how grateful I am for every day I’m given.”
An eye problem nagged him until late January, but Sacra said he’s now fully recovered.
“I’m doing fine, 100 percent,” he said, but acknowledges that many West African Ebola survivors still deal with serious health complications, the anguish of losing loved ones, and stigmatization upon returning to their battered communities.
Sacra said he doesn’t regret a thing. “Some risks are worth taking,” he says. “… I would not have changed what I did.”
He’s wasted little time resuming the medical mission work that he’s done for the greater part of his adult life.
Effectively rendered immune to Ebola, the University of Massachusetts Medical School assistant professor has returned to Liberia three times this year. He was the first of America’s handful of Ebola survivors to return to West Africa in January.
He also went back in April and July for additional stints at the mission hospital just outside the capital of Monrovia where he’s worked, off and on, for about two decades.
Sacra, who plans to return again in November, said the need for able health care workers is just as great now as it was during the throes of the epidemic last year, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said has claimed more than 11,000 lives.
Many Liberians who stayed away from hospitals at the peak of the epidemic are just starting to return with serious chronic ailments such as heart disease and AIDS, he said, pushing already strained facilities beyond capacity.
Just weeks ago, Liberia was declared Ebola-free for the second time this year.
Neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea, however, continue to see a small trickle of new Ebola cases each week, signs that the virus has been controlled but not completely eradicated.
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