Ebola survivor: 'You feel like a ghost'

Dr. Senga Omeonga met us under a huge mango tree outside the St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia. Behind the main building, several dozens of disinfected rubber boots worn by health care workers were propped upside down on stakes planted on a patch of lawn.

This is the hospital where he works as general surgeon and the head of Infection Prevention Control. It's also where he came down with Ebola on August 2.

He says his days in treatment were "a living hell." And the experience has changed his view of the world and the way he treats patients.

Dr. Senga is from the Democratic Republic of Congo but came to the country four years ago. He's 53, married and has four children two sons and two daughters. His family lives in Canada.

He remembers how unprepared everyone was for the outbreak. Medical workers were touching patients with their bare hands in the early days. He himself treated a patient with a wound from a motorcycle accident. When the patient was later diagnosed with Ebola, Dr. Senga was quarantined. But he didn't catch the virus.

Then he treated a sibling of Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian American who flew to Nigeria after contracting the Ebola virus and later died of the disease. And that, Dr. Senga says, is how he thinks he became one of Liberia's nearly 8,000 cases.

Dr. Senga was one of the fortunate ones. He was taken to the Ebola treatment unit, or ETU, at the Eternal Love Winning Africa hospital. After several weeks, he recovered and is now back at work.

He spoke with us about how Ebola nearly took his life and how the experience changed his life and the way he practices medicine.

You must have been very scared.

Yeah, I was very, very scared. Knowing what Ebola is and the death rate ... the chance of survival was very, very low. Because I was vomiting, my only hope was to take as much as I can, the fluids, the orals. I was forcing myself.

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Ebola survivor: 'You feel like a ghost'