4. EBOLA KISS | PAGES 81 — 84
While Ebola was breaking out in Kikwit, I spoke with a doctor named William T. Close, who had lived in Congo (Then Zaire) for sixteen years. When he was in Zaire, Bill Close rebuilt and ran the mama yemo general hospital, a two thousand-bed facility in the capital. When Ebola broke out for the first time, in 1976, Close went to Zaire and helped coordinate the medical effort to deal with the virus, and advised the Zairian Government. Years later, during the Ebola Kikwit outbreak, he acted as a liaison between Congolese government officials and doctors from the CDC in Atlanta.
“In 1976, when Ebola broke out in Yambuku that first time, there was a nun, Sister Beata, who died of Ebola,” Close recalled. “There was a priest, father Germain Lootens, who gave her the last rites as she died. She had a terrible fever, sweat was pouring down her face, and bloodstained tears were running down her face. Father Lootens took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from her forehead and the blood tears from her face. Then, unthinkingly, he took the bloodstained handkerchief and wiped the tears from his own face with it - he had been crying too. A week later he came down with Ebola, and a week after that he was dead.”
Now, Close had been hearing reports that some members of the medical staff of Kikwit General Hospital - Dr. Bwaka and his nurses - had continued to care for Ebola patients despite the grave risks to themselves. “Those hospital staff people have gone into that hospital to work knowing they may die,” Close said. And the doctors and nurses in Kikwit were working without basic medical supplies. “The greatest need in Kikwit right now is for rubber aprons to protect the doctors and nurses, because the blood and vomit is soaking through their operating gowns,” He said. “This is huge, lethal African hemorrhagic virus. We all sort of feel that Ebola comes out of its hiding place when something occasionally alters the very delicate balance of the ecosystems, in a tropical region where things grow as they would in a petri dish. But if there are lessons to be learned here, they are human lessons. This is about people doing their duty. It’s about doctors doing what has to be done, right now, without a whole lot of heroics. Have you ever been petrified with fear? Real fear? Possessed by naked fear, where you have no hope of control over your fate? If you’re a medical worker, when the die is cast, the fear goes away, and you do what you have to do - you get to work. That’s what’s happening with the medical people in that hospital right now. There are things happening in Kikwit. . .” He paused. “Magnificent human things…How can I explain this? There was another incident in 1976, also in Yambuku. One of the doctors - he was a Belgian named Jean-Francois Ruppol - delivered a baby in the middle of it all.” Ebola has a profound effect on pregnant women: they hemorrhage profusely and abort the fetus, which itself is infected with Ebola. “There were people dying of Ebola all around in that room in the hospital, and there was a woman in childbirth. She was Dr. Ruppol’s patient, and her baby was his patient, too. The baby was stuck - too big for the birth canal.” The woman had a high fever, she was terribly ill, but her baby had to be delivered, even if it was infected with Ebola.
“So he performed the Zarate procedure on her,” Close said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Zarate procedure? It’s a simple and rather crude but very effective way of enlarging the outlet to remove the baby.
“With a knife, you split the pubic symphysis.”
“The what?”
“The front of the pelvis. The pelvic bones.” He said.
It’s a hard, bony spot, and you can feel it, just above the pubic area, he said. “You split the bones there. You press the scalpel through cartilage. The bones go “pop” and the pelvis springs open, and you pull the baby out. The hospital had run out of anesthetics. So he did the Zarate procedure on the woman without giving her an anesthetic.”
“My God.”
“She was conscious. By the time he got the baby out, the baby had stopped breathing. The baby was in breathing arrest and drenched with the woman’s blood. He put the baby’s mouth to his mouth and gave the baby mouth to mouth resuscitation. The baby started to breathe. He pulled away, and his mouth and face were smeared with blood. There was a nurse standing by. When she saw his face she said, ‘Doctor, do you realize what you’ve done?’
“ ‘I do now,’ he said.”
( ■ ) 
It was breathtaking. The whole thing, fantastic visually. The way everything was spliced - the memory scenes, I mean. It’s close to how flashbacks really feel. Sure there are slight things to criticize, but I’m not going to. The movies are brilliant without having to count on overplayed scenes just to make up for a lack of substance. I’m hardly ever very impressed with wholesome movies. No, that’s not true. But my point stands out better now. 
