Ebola Survivor: "You Feel Like … Maybe … A Ghost"

Dr. Senga Omeonga pictured outside St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in Monrovia. Dr. Omeonga moved to Liberia from DRC in 2011. He contracted Ebola but survived it. John W. Poole/NPR hide caption

Dr. Senga Omeonga pictured outside St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in Monrovia. Dr. Omeonga moved to Liberia from DRC in 2011. He contracted Ebola but survived it.

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.

We [health care workers] are the warriors, so we need to fight this disease.

- Dr. Senga Omeonga, , head of Infection Prevention Control at St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital

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.

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Ebola Survivor: "You Feel Like ... Maybe ... A Ghost"