Craig Spencer, 'Ebola Doctor,' Says He Was Unfairly Cast As 'A Fraud, A Hipster, And A Hero'

Dr. Craig Spencer leaving New York City’s Bellevue Hospital after recovering from Ebola. Spencer has spoken frankly about his ordeal, sharing his disappointment with the media and politicians. (Photo: Corbis/Richard Drew)

Craig Spencer, MD, a 33-year-old attending emergency physician at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, lived in fear of contracting Ebola every day while treating patients with the deadly condition in Africa.

“While in Guinea, I often woke up sweating in the middle of the night, my heart racing. I might have felt warm, but my thermometer would read 97.7F —perhaps it was broken?” he writes in a new article for The New England Journal of Medicine. “Though I understood the connection between psychological stress and physical pain, I’d never experienced it like this … my work made it hard for me to relax and feel like myself.”

(Photos: Facebook/Craig Spencer)

However, he did his best. He was diligent about tracking his exposure and relative risk in a spreadsheet — while insisting that the risks and stresses were well worth the reward. “I was fueled by compassion and the immense challenge of caring for patients with Ebola,” he writes. “I’d never felt so deeply that my decisions could have a measurable impact on other people’s lives.”

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But then, Spencer returned home to trying times, having to live out the 21-day incubation period for the virus while watching his health status. He struggled to connect with others; even shaking hands, which was a prohibited action where he worked in Guinea, irked him to the core. He was exhausted. Spencer entered a depression.

(Photo: Facebook/Craig Spencer)

At the same time, though, he was monitoring his temperature twice a day and watching for any signs of a developing virus, constantly afraid of infecting his fiancée. Finally, his worst nightmare was realized when he registered a fever of 100.3F on October 23, 2014. He entered the hospital immediately, and was diagnosed with Ebola.

For Spencer, the next 19 days in treatment were spent running to the bathroom a dozen times a day and rapidly losing 20 pounds because he was unable to eat. Meanwhile, the media was retracing his steps — where he went to eat, where he went to bowl, where he rode the subway — afraid he may have left the Ebola in his wake while experiencing “symptoms”of the virus, namely fatigue.

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This was incorrect, Spencer writes; his fatigue was due to exhaustion from his time in Africa and not Ebola-spurred tiredness. “People excoriated me for going out in the city when I was symptomatic, but I hadn’t been symptomatic —just sad,” he says. “I was labeled a fraud, a hipster, and a hero.”

In particular, Spencer criticizes the response of politicians who perpetuated fear. “Fear in measured doses can be therapeutic and inform rational responses, but in excess, it fosters poor decision making that can be harmful,”he says. “After my diagnosis, the media and politicians could have educated the public about Ebola. Instead, they spent hours retracing my steps through New York and debating whether Ebola can be transmitted through a bowling ball.”

He writes that the media and politicians could have quelled fears by looking at what we know about Ebola. “Little attention was devoted to the fact that the science of disease transmission and the experience in previous Ebola outbreaks suggested that it was nearly impossible for me to have transmitted the virus before I had a fever,” he says.

Spencer says that politicians, in the middle of midterm election pressure, chose not to focus on factual information, instead trying to box up potential infections. “The threat of quarantine may cause sick people to defer seeking treatment,” he writes. “At times of threat to our public health, we need one pragmatic response, not 50 viewpoints that shift with the proximity of the next election.”

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He now feels sorry for his fellow doctors who return to the U.S. only to become pariahs, quarantined from social life, enduring that “21-day waiting period before they can transition from public health hazard to hero.”

The day Spencer’s fever broke was the day of the midterm elections, Nov. 4, 2014. This was also the day politicians stopped focusing on awareness of Ebola, not just stateside, but abroad, he writes. Spencer says the media attention died off, too — just after he left Bellevue Hospital as an Ebola-free survivor on Nov 11.

He never wanted to be the focus, but the attention on the virus shouldn’t have stopped with him, he says. “The real Ebola epidemic still rages in West Africa,” Spencer writes in his article. “The number of new cases is stabilizing in some areas and declining in others, but more than 23,000 people have been infected, and many are still dying from this disease.”

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