Beacon Physician Makes a Difference in Africa

When the Ebola virus struck the West African nations of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone in 2014, it was a devastating blow to a region already laden with innumerable burdens.

Dr. Monika Niemiec shared the simple joy of a selfie with an iPad with a few children.

In Liberia, 20 years of a bloody civil war left an estimated 250,000 people dead; many who lived endured unthinkable acts of violence. Today, just 13 years after the end of the war, Liberia has virtually no infrastructure, sanitation or connectivity to the rest of the world. Add in the catastrophic effects of malnutrition and diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, measles, cholera and dozens of others, and you find a population whose daily survival is a true uncertainty.

Monika Niemiec, MD, a Beacon Medical Group hospitalist at Memorial, chose this setting for her first mission for Doctors Without Borders in April 2015, establishing the first Ebola survivors clinic in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. Her six-month assignment also included working in the city’s new pediatric hospital.

Recounting stories while browsing through photos of her patients, colleagues and surroundings from the mission, Dr. Niemiec’s passion for the work becomes clear.

“Doing volunteer work is just a big part of who I am,” she explains. “My undergraduate work was in civil engineering and I did mission projects in Nicaragua — rehab projects after Hurricane Mitch struck in the late ’90s — and it just grew from there. When I switched into medicine, I wanted to continue volunteering.”

In her work in Monrovia, she and her team cared for patients ranging from infants to the elderly. Having electricity at the clinic and hospital was never a guarantee. Medical supplies were scarce and unpredictable, as were the limited lab services available — she could check hemoglobin and for hepatitis C and HIV. Running pathology on a patient was impossible — there weren’t any microbiologists in the country.

Treating the Visible and Invisible Wounds

Beyond the physical ailments of Ebola survivors — joint pain, vision and hearing problems, among others — Dr. Niemiec discovered the survivors suffered just as many emotional and social injuries.

The life expectancy for men in Liberia is 61 years and 63 years for women, according to the World Health Organization.

“People were ostracized in their communities, people were being rejected at the doors of hospitals — the few hospitals that were left. People were being denied any kind of medical care or community care. They weren’t allowed in their churches because there was such a stigma surrounding the disease.”

One young man, Alex, 22, traveled from his village three hours away to the Monrovia clinic to seek care for a large, tumor-like growth around one of his eyes.

“People were accosting him in the streets, saying he looked like a freak. He became suicidal,” says Dr. Niemiec.

Despite the lack of medical services or tests she could offer to Alex, she did find a local Liberian ophthalmologist who agreed to perform surgery on the growth. Though coordinating schedules with the city’s single nurse anesthetist was a challenge (she covered four hospitals), the team managed to drain the growth. Whatever the condition was, it had liquefied the eye completely.

“I’ll never know what caused it, but does it matter in the end?” Dr. Niemiec ponders. “He’s OK. Alex told me before I left that he had re-enrolled in school — he was going into the fourth grade.”

Before she left Liberia, the ophthalmologist also promised her that he’d get Alex a prosthetic eye.

More Work To Do

More missions with Doctors Without Borders seem a certainty for Dr. Niemiec. In the meantime, she’s planning to go to Haiti this November with the group of Memorial Hospital emergency medicine physicians, anesthesiologists and surgeons who volunteer their services each year at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

And though Liberia is over 5,000 miles away from South Bend, its people seem to remain close in Dr. Niemiec’s mind.

“It was tough, thinking that we have so much and they have nothing,” she says. “But you make do with your situation. It makes you really appreciate what we have here.”