Heather Bellamy spoke with Dr Kent and Amber Brantly about their time in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak.

Dr Kent and Amber Brantly with their children

Dr Kent Brantly with his wife Amber went to Liberia in 2013, to provide medical care for those in great need. Less than a year later, Kent had contracted the deadly Ebola virus. They have now released their story in the book Called For Life and Heather Bellamy spoke with both Kent and Amber about the devastation caused by Ebola, the miracle of his recovery, meeting the President and their hopes for the future.

Heather: Why did you go to Liberia?

Kent: We moved to Liberia to provide medical care to people in great need. I feel like that's a calling that God placed on our lives, to use our gifts, skills and talents to serve other people and to love our neighbours.

Heather: Was there a specific need out there that you were going to meet?

Kent: We moved to Liberia to work at ELWA hospital with the team there. Dr Rick Sacra was my mentor and he had a plan for starting a family medicine residency programme for Liberian doctors and we were going to be a part of that training programme.

Heather: You were in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak. Can you describe what the reality of that outbreak was like?

Kent: The reality of that outbreak was horrifying. It was an incredibly stressful time for our family and our team. For months before we ever had a patient, we dealt with the looming threat of Ebola showing up at our hospital. Then once we started treating patients with Ebola, we were faced with the real terror of the disease itself. As we watched patients die, there was so little we could do for them. We tried to provide the best care possible, but we saw patient after patient have their dignity taken away from them by this disease. It stripped control of their bodily functions and made them totally dependent on strangers, who were covered up in all of this personal protective equipment. In the end it took the life of almost every patient we saw.

Heather: That must take a huge toll on you. How did living through that crisis affect you?

Kent: In the midst of a trial like that, there's not a lot of time for reflection or introspection. We were working hard to survive every day, to meet the needs of our patients, to stay together as a family and a team and there wasn't a lot of time to ponder the philosophical ramifications of what we were experiencing. But it was very difficult, we spent a lot of time praying together and really trying to stay safe, while taking care of people who were in a terrible situation.

Heather: How did the outbreak affect the people who were living under the threat of Ebola? Did you see significant changes to the communities around you?

Kent: The communities around Monrovia saw significant impact from this outbreak. Liberia is a very communal society, people live in very close proximity to each other and their lives are very interconnected. As this disease started spreading though communities, it produced a level of fear, of not only the disease, but fear of your neighbour and fear that the person in front of you might be a risk to your own health and life. For the health care providers, it created a level of fear even at home. When I would come home at the end of the day, it was a little different than coming home at the end of a regular work day. I wouldn't embrace my wife or my children when I walked through the door. I'd go in and shower first and put on clean clothes and then I would embrace them and have our family time together. It produced a lot of fear in society and between people.

Heather: Were health care providers prepared for such an outbreak? What's your opinion of how it was responded to?

Kent: There's no question that the health care infrastructures in West Africa were not prepared for an outbreak like this. There was no way for them to have been prepared. These health care systems have been so devastated by years of civil war and conflict and they are in a rebuilding period. They just weren't prepared for something of this scale. The fact that it took two years to bring this outbreak to an end, shows us that we were not prepared. In the United States and in other countries, there was a slow response from the international community to come to the aid of our neighbours in West Africa. I think in the end the international communities did come together, but it took far too long.

Heather: And Kent, you actually contracted Ebola, even with all those precautions you're saying that you took. How did that happen?