Meet the Minnesotans ready to fight Ebola

Peter Swanson will drop everything at a moment's notice and report to a special isolation unit at his hospital if the University of Minnesota receives an Ebola patient.

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There are no perks to Swanson's assignment — no extra vacation days or hazard pay. The fact that he could be putting his life in danger is not lost on the 33-year-old. As a nurse, he'd likely be exposed to an Ebola patient's infected blood, vomit and diarrhea. He volunteered for the care team anyway out of a sense of duty to his patients.

"We're nurses," said Swanson. "Every day is a risk to some degree, and here I saw it as just another level of risk."

Health workers treating Ebola patients have been hailed as heroes for doing jobs that put them at risk of being infected with the deadly virus. In Minnesota, working on an Ebola care team at any of the state's four referral hospitals will be voluntary, for now. What motivates some health workers to sign up for the possibly hazardous duty?

"I didn't have a bit of hesitation," Swanson said. "I just told my wife, 'Oh yeah, I signed up to do this' and that was it. For me it's not Ebola in the bed, it's a patient."

Swanson acknowledged his decision startled his wife, although her fears eased when he walked her through each step he would take to protect himself.

Laboratory worker Joe Wawrzyniak did not tell his wife before volunteering and said he should have. "I dreaded going home and having that conversation with her."

In his lab, Wawrzyniak would be unlikely to have any direct contact with an Ebola patient. But he would have to package and process infectious blood samples.

There would always be a laboratory buddy watching him work to make sure he didn't touch anything he shouldn't touch. Even then, the risk of Ebola exposure can't be eliminated, which is what troubled his wife when she learned of his decision.

"She seemed questioning at first — why would I do it?" he said. "I told her it is an obligation to our patients and then she just said she didn't want to know anymore, and just said that I wouldn't do anything that I felt uncomfortable with."

Surgical nurse Courtney Pickel didn't have a spouse or children to consider when she volunteered for the Ebola care team. If she had been a mother, the 24-year-old probably would not have signed up.

Fear of exposing a loved one to the virus is one of the main reasons many of her nursing colleagues have been reluctant to treat a potential Ebola patient, she said.

That's fair, she added.

Pickel is one of nine university nurses out of an intensive care nursing staff of more than 220 to volunteer for the Ebola care team. A half dozen or so nurses from other Fairview hospitals have also joined the team.

Like some of her team members, Pickel feels professionally obligated to care for an Ebola patient. And, she says it wouldn't be challenging for her to get to the hospital within an hour of being called in.

Pickel didn't volunteer just because she could, or even should, do it. She views her choice as an opportunity to be among the first Minnesota health workers battling a new disease threat.

"You don't really get a lot of experiences like that," she said.

Part of the experience would inevitably include dealing with an Ebola-wary public, who may laud and, simultaneously, shun frontline health workers.

Last month when a Maine nurse returning from a West African Ebola ward fought her 21-day quarantine, a national debate erupted over her right to move freely in public.

In Minnesota, health workers with direct exposure to the virus, such as a needle stick injury, could be pressured by public health authorities to quarantine themselves, even though Ebola cannot be transmitted to others until an infected person begins showing symptoms.

Dr. Sam Gupta, one of eight pediatric physicians on the university's Ebola care team, said he wouldn't fight quarantine and doesn't think other health workers should resist the policy either if it makes the public feel safer.

"I personally think it's the right thing to do for yourself and for your community," Gupta said, "especially for someone who is coming over from Africa who clearly has had contact with positive patients."

Gupta, 40, said the public's anxiety about Ebola reminds him of how people reacted to HIV and AIDS before effective treatments were discovered.

People were afraid to go to the dentist or participate in community activities for fear of catching HIV, but eventually the public learned that the virus didn't spread as easily as many had feared, he recalled.

Gupta hopes Minnesotans will be able to put Ebola in the proper perspective, too, if a patient here is diagnosed with the virus.