- Laura Collins was reporting on the outbreak in Dallas when she fell ill after interviewing family who had contact with victim Thomas Duncan
- She presented herself to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital – which had treated Duncan and the two nurses who got the virus from treating him
- Collins’ nurses didn’t seem to know what they should be doing
- They were unsure of how many layers they should wear, in what order to put them on and even removed the gear just feet away from CollinsÂ
- Hospital has come under fire for inadequately containing the virusÂ
Laura Collins In Dallas, Texas for MailOnline
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Worrying: Laura Collins was alarmed by what she saw at Texas Healthcare Presbyterian Hospital
On Saturday October 4 at around 12.30pm, I found myself sitting in an isolation room in Texas Presbyterian Hospital ER.
A few moments earlier the doctor on duty had waved from his desk outside my glass box, identifying himself as the medic speaking to me over the phone.
He had placed a call to the Center for Disease Control, he explained, and was just waiting to hear back from them before deciding how to proceed.
I thanked him and told him I sincerely hoped I was wasting his time. Certainly under normal circumstances the symptoms I was experiencing would not have brought me to an ER.Â
I had started feeling unwell late the previous evening, was sweating through the night and woke nauseated and with an upset stomach. Usually I would have put it down to too much coffee or bad crab cakes.
But these were not normal circumstances. I was in Dallas covering the Ebola outbreak.Â
What didn’t help calm my growing sense of worry was the lack of training shown by the nurses caring for me.
I had landed two days earlier and went straight to the home of Aaron Yah, 42, and Youngor Jallah, 35. At the time I knew only that Mr Yah had been quoted speaking as a friend of Thomas Eric Duncan, the 42-year-old whose life was claimed by the virus last week.
Mr Duncan had come to America to marry Louise Troh, 54, the woman he called the ‘love of his life’, mother to their 19-year-old son, Kasiah Eric, and also the mother to, as it turned out, Youngor Jallah.Â
Scroll down for videoÂ
In the dark: The nurses in the ER didn’t seem to know the protocol for putting on their personal protection suits (pictured here are nurses in New York demonstrating how they would receive an Ebola patient)
Today show on Thursday how although protective gear had been upgraded from the original mask, gown, gloves and booties – there was a gap of several inches at the neck. When she asked why her neck was exposed, she was told to cover the gap with strips of one-inch tape.
Accounts have emerged of contaminated waste left to pile ‘ceiling high’ in the room where Mr Duncan was treated, of nurses who cared for him attending to other patients, of protocols not in place and health professionals unprepared and unprotected.
Texas Presbyterian has vigorously defended itself against the complaints allegedly made by members of their staff, claiming that all CDC protocols had been followed.
But from what I observed in my isolation room that day they sound entirely and horribly credible.
Again I stress I am not criticizing the nurses but the fact that they were so clearly under-rehearsed – if rehearsed at all – in this absolutely crucial aspect of containing the virus killing a man in his hospital bed just a few floors away.
After much debate a nurse entered my room, swathed in protective clothing – face mask, visor, gloves, booties, apron, gown, hood. She took my temperature. It was 99.5 degrees, the same ‘low level fever’ that nurse Amber Jay Vinson, was running when CDC cleared her to board a commercial flight from Cleveland to Dallas on Monday.
The nurse told me she was wearing three layers of everything – including gloves – and she apologized for fumbling as she attached a clip to my finger to hook me up to a monitor to read my heart rate.
But at the end of the examination – before any word had come back from CDC – she stood right next to me, working through each layer and removing them one by one, rubbing what she was still wearing with bleach and doing the same with the discarded one before placing it in a container.
I couldn’t help wondering at the time, shouldn’t there be some sort of double seal in all of this? A space between me and the ward beyond where all this should happen? Why bother getting suited up before coming in if you’re going to take it all off and be completely exposed before leaving? Was that happening at Mr Duncan’s bedside?
Exposed: Nurse Briana Aguirre indicates where her neck wasn’t covered while she treated her colleague Nina Pham who contracted Ebola at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas
After what seemed like an eternity the doctor to whom I had spoken via phone came in to tell me that he had heard back from the CDC and they did not believe anybody in the community was infectious.
He said he would add my name to the CDC’s list and instructed me to come back and get checked out again, ‘if my condition worsened.’
A couple of days later a nurse from the ER telephoned to see whether or not my condition had indeed deteriorated. I was sitting in a parking lot in Dallas. I was both touched by the follow-up and consumed by the question, ‘What if it had?’ Why had they let me walk out if they thought there was even the vaguest possibility that it might?
Wasn’t this the same ER that had let a patient walk out only to return with such devastating consequences two days later when his condition worsened?
As I left that Saturday I was mortified at having wasted medics’ time and causing them unnecessary anxiety. But the doctor told me not to be. He said he was grateful I had come in and that I had done the right and responsible thing by taking every action to limit any possible risk to the wider public.
Can the same be said of Texas Presbyterian Health and the CDC?
or comment on this article
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