Doctor to patient: An Ebola survivor's odyssey
Ian Crozier, MD, is a walking laboratory for Ebola and a living testament to the damaging, long-term consequences of the disease, which are still very poorly understood.
As a volunteer physician with the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone, he worked furiously last fall to save patients in the heat of the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Then on Sept. 9, 2014, he became one of those patients himself and was airlifted to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where his vital organs rapidly began shutting down.
During an Oct. 21 appearance at Stanford, Crozier recounted his astonishing recovery, during which he rebounded from a torturous period of being hooked to a ventilator and a kidney dialysis machine, experiencing abnormal heart rhythms, and developing severe encephalopathy that left him delirious and then unconscious for weeks, ultimately suffering several hemorrhagic strokes.
“If I you had told me on day one that I would develop multisystem organ failure and asked me to predict my chances of survival, I would have said my chances were zero,” he told more than 100 faculty, students and staff in a standing-room only talk at the School of Medicine. “They [the Emory caregivers] really changed the game…. I really think they were walking on the moon, but in a different kind of space suit.”
Dr. Ian Crozier, dressed in personal protective equipment, with Ebola-positive Sierra Leonean children. Schools remain closed in Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries hit hard by the Ebola outbreak.
He was among the sickest of patients to survive the disease and continues to suffer from a variety of disturbing consequences, including eye problems, hearing loss with tinnitus, short-term memory loss, seizures and sleep dysregulation, he said. He wryly cautioned his audience that he was approaching his “hour of narcolepsy” as he started his late- afternoon talk.
Crozier’s talk was sponsored by the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Immunology and the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program.
It coincided with a plethora of recent news reports on the long-term consequences suffered by many Ebola survivors. The epidemic has killed more than 11,300 people and has not reached its end; in just the last few weeks, three new cases were reported.