While New York held its collective breath last week, frightened over reports that an anonymous patient at The Mount Sinai Hospital was infected with the deadly Ebola virus, Eric Silverman’s feverish eyes were glued to CNN.
“Is that me they are talking about?” the incredulous 27-year-old Brooklyn grad student asked his nurse, Margaret Kraus, as she tended to him in the intensive care unit’s isolation room.
It was, indeed.
Silverman is the mystery man who was quarantined in the Manhattan hospital for three anxious days after he told doctors he had just returned from Sierra Leone in West Africa, where he had been doing humanitarian aid work. He was complaining of flu-like symptoms all too familiar to Ebola victims — a high fever, a sore throat, headache and diarrhea. The hospital had no choice but to isolate him and gear up for what might be the first of many such scares.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily News, Silverman broke his silence, recounting the hellish ordeal and then the great relief he and his family experienced when test results from the CDC found no trace of Ebola. He could go home to Prospect Heights to recover and resume a normal life.
“It was surreal,” said Silverman, who will begin a master’s program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs next month. “Even my friends didn’t believe me when I told them I was the mystery patient. They thought I was joking.”
“We were just stunned and very concerned for Eric and for our family,” added his mother, Sandra Schpoont, who brought her son to the emergency room on family doctor’s orders last Sunday night. “We had just had a family dinner the night before, and everyone was hugging and kissing. Now we were all very worried.”
Silverman’s saga began when he went to Sierra Leone in April for a four-month project to do agriculture and construction work. Unbeknownst to him, he was working in the bush in the Kailahun district where cases of Ebola were beginning to erupt. He was healthy for the duration of his assignment, and returned to New York July 17 to celebrate his mom’s birthday and enjoy a family vacation.
But two weeks later — still within the 21-day incubation period for Ebola — Silverman started feeling sick. He recalled being out with friends on the Upper West Side last Sunday afternoon, and was suddenly shivering on a hot summer day.
“I turned up the heat in the car to 90 degrees and drove back to Brooklyn,” said Silverman, who had also spent three years after college in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps. “Then I got out of the car and I was freezing again. My mother took my temperature and it was 104. When she called our family doctor, she said to get me to the emergency room at Mount Sinai.”
Dr. Annette Osher alerted the hospital’s emergency room doctors that she was sending them her patient and that he had recently returned from Sierra Leone, one of the countries hardest hit by Ebola. As Silverman and his mother got into a livery car close to midnight, he warned his mother: “Don’t mention the ‘E-word’ in the cab, or else we’re never going to make it up there.”
Silverman was greeted by Mount Sinai staff wearing protective masks. They placed him in a separate room, away from the rest of the emergency room patients.
But that was just the beginning of what would be a new and nerve-wracking experience for both hospital staff and Silverman.
“Only when I woke up on Monday and they wouldn’t let me out of the room, I knew something was wrong,” he said. “I saw people wearing these space suits and I realized they couldn’t rule out Ebola. They needed to quarantine me until they could confirm it wasn’t.”
As hospital staff suited up into special head-to-toe protective gear — complete with masks, hoods, double plastic gowns and double sets of gloves — hallways were cleared and Silverman was whisked on a gurney out of the ER on a journey up to the medical intensive care unit. His boxer shorts were incinerated as a precaution against infected bodily fluids. His family was forbidden to visit.
“I closed off Eric’s room at home, nobody went in, and then we just waited,” said Schpoont, as she fielded daily calls from his doctors and the president of Mount Sinai, Dr. David Reich, updating his condition and lab results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “It was a long wait. I felt really bad for Eric. He was in isolation hooked up to all these monitors. Two days before he was riding his bike 40 miles around New York.”
The handful of doctors and nurses allowed to care for him were also unnerved dealing with this kind of emergency for the first time.
Kraus, a 33-year veteran nurse at Sinai, said she will never forget the 72 hours of Silverman’s stay, comparing the intensity of focus, professionalism and private sighs of “Oh my God” to the night Hurricane Sandy brought dozens of evacuated patients to Sinai from flooded NYU Langone.
“If he had the Ebola virus, we all knew how it could impact so many people’s lives,” Kraus said.
Silverman, whose easygoing manner made him a model patient, had contracted malaria in February and initially thought it was a recurrence, since many of the symptoms were the same.
So he wasn’t really frightened that he had Ebola until a doctor entered his room and said, “We have good news — the tests came back negative for malaria.”
“That was a little scary,” Silverman said. “I knew I had been in the area where the outbreak started, at the end of May, and I started to think about who I had been with in Sierra Leone in the last week I was there. But I couldn’t think of anyone who was that sick who could have given me the disease. I hadn’t been exposed, as far as I knew.”
It was not until late Wednesday afternoon that the CDC test results came back. They were negative for Ebola.
“We all had a huge sense of relief — for him and the staff,” said Dr. Charles Powell, chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine for the Mount Sinai Health System. “It is a scary situation for so many reasons. There’s a lot we don’t know, but we do know how deadly this can be. We were all worried that Ebola had arrived in New York City.”
Asked about the chances of that happening, Powell added: “In my opinion I think we will see a case here. The situation in Africa does not appear to be under control, and it’s so easy to travel from place to place. As a result of this episode, all the health care institutions in New York are going to be well prepared to recognize it early and assemble the procedures to care for these patients.”
Facing the worst known outbreak of the Ebola virus, with almost 1,000 fatalities in West Africa, the World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency on Friday. The organization acknowledged that the outbreak, already in its sixth month, was far from being contained.
As for Silverman, the big-hearted Brooklynite who first fell in love with Africa when he spent his junior year abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, he plans to return to help the friendly people of Sierra Leone once it’s safe from Ebola. He had taught math and English there and helped build housing for local teachers.
But first, he will be back at Mount Sinai on Monday for a checkup with infectious disease guru Dr. Glenn Hammer. It may never be known what Silverman was stricken with — the best guess is some kind of bacterial infection or traveler- associated parasite.
“I think the people at Mount Sinai did a great job coordinating everything and making sure people didn’t freak out and evacuate the hospital,” he said. “The nurses were very nice to me, they kept my spirits up. One of them, Candice, made her husband go buy me some new boxers.
“When Dr. Powell and the hospital president, David Reich, both walked into my room not wearing hazmat suits, I knew then I was clear!” he said. “This was definitely an experience.”
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