This week, the First Opinion that has most stuck with me is Krutika Kuppalli’s essay on her personal experience with Ebola: first as a physician helping to run an Ebola Treatment Unit in Sierra Leone in 2014, then, upon her return to the U.S., as a possible patient. She eventually tested negative for Ebola, but not before getting a sense of what her patients had experienced. “When we arrived at the hospital near midnight sirens blaring, another group of health workers in [personal protective equipment] was waiting,” she writes. “I remember the wheelchair coming toward me and the dozens of people staring as I was rushed into the isolation unit. In that moment, I no longer felt like a physician or a person — I felt like a threat.”

What’s most important about this piece is not Krutika’s own story, though that is deeply compelling. It’s that she uses her experience to remind us that stories about Ebola often overlook the experiences of Africans: the health care workers, the patients, their families.

She writes about “the disorientation of returning to a country that mobilized enormous resources around my single suspected case. Meanwhile, the people I had just left behind — hundreds of patients and dozens of local health care workers — received only a fraction of that attention and care.”

It’s something I hope to keep in mind as the Ebola outbreak, inevitably, continues.

Recommendation of the week: The other day, I revisited one of my all-time favorite longform articles: a 2005 feature about two young Amish men, unrelated but both named Abner Stoltzfus, who ended up dealing cocaine while working with the Pagans motorcycle gang. It’s just as good as I remembered.