Before he even attended medical school, Mansfield native Dr. Steven Hatch knew he wanted to help find a solution to the Ebola virus. For about five weeks, from the beginning of October to early November, Hatch was part of the solution, as he treated Ebola patients in Liberia, West Africa.
Hatch, a 1987 graduate of Malabar High School, partook in this endeavor with a group called the International Medical Corps as either the late first-wave or early second-wave responders to the Ebola outbreak.
In Bong County, Liberia, he took care of patients with both suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola. The unit where he worked was split into a Suspect Ward, where those who may have symptoms that looked like Ebola but need confirmation with a blood test were sent, and a Confirmed Ward, where those who tested positive with the virus were sent.
About half of the patients they cared for didn’t have Ebola, but had other problems like malaria, typhoid fever, hepatitis, or just routine problems in pregnancy, noted Hatch.
Samples of the patients’ blood were sent to a lab run by the U.S. Navy, and generally, the doctors would get same-day results, said Hatch. Those who tested negative for the virus would be sent home and the positive patients would be moved to the Confirmed Ward.
“More than half of the patients who are positive died, about 60 percent while I was there,” he said. “Both of those stats (half are positive, 60 percent die) are pretty much the same as the national averages, for better or worse.”
He compared his work in Africa to that of his job in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he is an infectious disease physician. “What I do there [in Africa] is not structurally much different than what I do here [in Massachusetts]. I go to the patients, ask them about their symptoms, make assessments as to what their problems are—that is, what problems they might have if it turns out they don’t have Ebola, and what their status is if they do have Ebola—try to come up with a medical plan to help them whatever their situation, and try my damnedest to allay their fears and give them hope and comfort,” he said.
He worked hard to alleviate the patients’ fears, which he said was especially challenging while wearing the personal protective equipment (PPE) that he was required to wear. “Believe me, they’re scared. They all think they’re going to die, and some of them are going to die, but I tried very hard to take the fear away as much as possible, which is a bit of a challenge when you look like someone on Mars (if you’re an adult) or a monster (if you’re a child). So I spent a lot of time just talking with them to get them to not pay as much attention to the space suits that we were wearing. Sometimes it didn’t work, but generally I think it did reasonably well at humanizing the process as much as possible,” he said.
Although he recognized the value of the PPE, he said, “I would come out after two hours and I had so much sweat in my boots that I just stood on one leg and tilted the other leg so that it was pointing down, and there was just a stream of it that would come out. When it got hot and humid—and it was almost always hot and humid during the day shifts—the mask would often get so wet that when you started to breathe hard from the physical stress, which usually kicked in around the end of the first hour, the mask would get sucked in and you’d be getting half air, half sweat. It was hard work.”
In addition to the PPE—which he feels is about 99 percent effective in protecting people from the virus—he said he washed his hands frequently in chlorine bleach solution when he saw patients.
“The good news is the virus is pretty easily deactivated, and even if you somehow got a splash on your skin, if you use good hand cleaning techniques, you probably aren’t going to get infected,” he said.
Hatch maintains a healthy respect toward this deadly disease. “This is an incredibly deadly virus, and I was never, ever truly casual about the risks I was facing when I was in there. I have a very healthy respect for this virus, although that was different than fearing it. I never was scared in the ‘Hot Zone.’ But I was always very, very careful,” he said.
He explained, “Fear makes you jumpy, and when you get jumpy you’re much more likely to make a mistake and, moreover, you’re likely to scare your patients as well, which to me is not only not acceptable because I am supposed to give my patients comfort and strength in facing their illness, but it’s also potentially dangerous to have a patient who is so terrified that they do something unexpected, like run out of the unit and into the middle of the compound, where they might infect other people. We do not keep anyone against their will so it’s pretty easy to leave the wards if you’re determined.”
He added, “Nobody ever did panic like that, and I think it’s because we worked so hard to give them a sense of comfort and care. So my pulse never once rose from anxiety or fear while I worked in there. It was always business as usual, just a strange kind of business.”
Since returning to his home in Boston, Massachusetts, Hatch said, “I’m still processing the experience, and it will take some time to have some perspective on what all went down. People here who have been following the tragedy over there are so overcome with emotion, which makes sense, but when I was there it was a job, and I didn’t allow myself to be overwhelmed with the grief of what was happening around me.”
He suspects that maybe someday “the full horror” of what he witnessed will register. He said, “I’m not there yet. I get how awful it was on an intellectual level, but I just haven’t felt it in my bones.”
Hatch, who was originally on track to become an English professor, graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 2002. He later went to Tufts in Boston for internal medicine training.
Afterward, he completed his infectious disease specialty training at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, which had a research program in a different hemorrhagic fever virus known as Dengue. “Dengue isn’t nearly as deadly [as Ebola], but it’s a quirky virus, so I took that as a good backup plan and I did research in South America for about four or five years,” he said.
In addition to his work as an infectious disease specialist, Hatch is an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School.
He is supported by his wife Miriam and his twin 13-year-old children, Erez and Ariella.
Of his experience in Liberia, he said, “I feel like I was incredibly privileged to work with the people that I did in this very important moment in the history of medicine. The expats were amazingly dynamic people, and the Liberian national staff were people of tremendous determination and grace. They endured suspicion from their neighbors for working at the unit. They have watched their friends and sometimes some of their families die in front of them, and they go to work every day facing this beastly, deadly virus up close. They don’t get to take a break from this. They can’t jump on a plane to carry them to a safer place like I did, where mostly people want to welcome me with open arms and say nice things about me. So for me, that is the definition of courage.”
As for future plans, Hatch noted, “We’ve made incredible progress in Liberia, but things now appear to be desperate in Sierra Leone, so perhaps there will be work there for me to do. I may also return to Liberia and help working on rebuilding their medical services since Ebola pretty much shut everything down and many health care workers, especially nurses, died over the summer caring for the first big wave of patients. So I don’t yet know what’s going to happen. And maybe I’ll just help the effort from over here, although I’m the kind of person who’s happier being on the front lines than back at headquarters, so we’ll see.”
