Preston Gorman
Benefitting The Refuge
Preston Gorman spent 27 days in the NIH Isolation Unit fighting the Ebola virus. Gorman was a young former firefighter and paramedic when he quit his job to volunteer as a nurse working on the front lines of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. After contracting the virus, he was placed in a coffin shaped plastic bubble for the 17 hour plane ride back to the United States. He was described as one of the sickest patients to ever be treated there. Preston was placed in complete isolation where 60 specially trained doctors volunteered to treat him. Less than a month later, Preston walked out the hospital doors and would choose to remain anonymous for the next 5 years. In the episode, he speaks candidly about surviving Ebola, living with PTSD, his darkest moments, lessons on faith, family and the road to rediscovering joy and hope.
Wise Words
“The first sign that we were entering something that was, once we landed in Sierra Leone and get off the plane, that’s when, as you entered, I think, the airport terminal, they were checking your temperature in and out.”
“Then they had all these signs up, all these signs everywhere, showing picture descriptions of symptoms and if you have any of these, then report here. There were very strict controls on who is in and who is out. There were hand-washing stations everywhere with bleach solution everywhere, so somewhat surreal to kind of...you walk into that, and you go, “This is not home. This is not Kansas anymore.”
“I think in that outbreak, the mortality was 40%, which for an infectious disease, is quite high.”
“Then there was this giant red strip. When you stepped across that line, that meant you were going into the red zone, which means you’re going into where the infected patients were, or potentially infected patients were, and you could not come back across that red line. There was a separate exit after you made a deliberate circle through the place. It was a separate place that you exited. Once you crossed that line, you were in.”
“The things we go through in life, typically, we’re experiencing them either alongside other people or someone else has already gone through it so they can coach you. I had neither of those. There was no one going through it with me, and no one had gone through it, that I knew of anyway.”
“It was kind of like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to have human contact,” but then, “Oh my gosh, what do I do now? What happens now? Yea, there was two parts of me like, “Man this is so much better than being in a bubble, but this is also very overwhelming.”
“I had entered the ICU one person, and I was coming out another person. Very early on, I could feel that difference of ‘I’ve just been through an experience that I don’t understand, and I don’t know how to process this. And I’m very overwhelmed with human contact because, even though I need it, I don’t know what to do with it, and I don’t know who I am anymore.’”
“For me, yes. Infact, I remember they’d had a little party for me about two weeks after I’d come home. I remember feeling deeply confused. The thought in my head was, “Why are we celebrating? Why is the narrative, ‘Preston’s alive’? Because the real narrative is there’s still people dying over there.” Yes, I felt a lot of survivor’s guilt.”
“I found a trauma therapist, which was incredibly, incredibly helpful. That was a big step to start digging through the layers. Just had to do a lot of counseling and digging through what had taken place.”
“In facing my own death, I can no longer now live with any illusions. I can’t afford to and I’m not able to, because it’s like I’ve seen the other side.”
“There’s a certain soberness I have about life that probably a lot of people don’t, my age, because I’ve come face-to-face with leaving this earth.”
“Society and even my family, they wanted the nice tidy bow. That’s what produced most of the pain is that they wanted that nice tidy bow. There was not going to be a nice tidy bow.”
“Just because someone looks okay on the outside doesn’t mean they’re okay on the inside, and especially if they’ve been through some kind of trauma. There may be part of them that’s not okay. And that sometimes you have to be really careful how you talk to that person, and be careful what expectations you might put on them, because if they feel your expectation to just be normal, they’re not going to feel accepted for where they are. I want people to realize that healing is a process. It’s not a destination. Sometimes it has an endpoint and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s a process. Everybody’s process looks differently.”
Links
Contact Preston at: preston.gorman10@gmail.com
Charity: The Refuge