MONROVIA, Liberia — The woman at the Brussels Airlines city check-in office told me to arrive at Robertsfield Airport three hours before my 8:40 p.m. flight.

My sister, who still lives in my family’s native Liberia, dropped me off at the airport gate at 5:15 p.m. You have to get your temperature checked simply to enter the airport grounds, so I got out of the car at the gate. I did not hug or kiss her goodbye.

I had dropped my luggage off at the city check-in office so I wouldn’t have to deal with it again until Washington. I carried a blue canvas handbag crammed with wallet, laptop, two cellphones, passport, change of clothing, bleach wipes, and two Ziploc bags full of the malaria pills and immune boosters I had been taking for the two weeks I had been covering the Ebola outbreak. And now I was taking the same route to the United States flown by Thomas Eric Duncan, the man who, after traveling on to Dallas, fell to the disease.

At 5:23, the guard at the gate pointed his laser thermometer at my forehead. In the two weeks I had been in Monrovia, my temperature — taken an average of six to eight times daily — tended to hover between 35.4 and 36.5 degrees Celsius, which are normal body temperatures. Once it got up to 36.9 degrees, and I became alarmed. Above 38 degrees Celsius is when they start asking other questions. No one wants to be there.