• Amber Vinson, 2nd Dallas Nurse Stricken with Ebola, Slams CDC's Criticism

    Amber Vinson was the second nurse who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to become infected with the Ebola virus. She raised eyebrows for taking a flight from Dallas to Ohio, and then back again a few days later while supposedly having a low-grade fever. Vinson was finally declared Ebola-free and released from the hospital last week, and while she asked for her privacy, I think many expected to hear from her because the CDC momentarily let her be its fall girl. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said Vinson should never have flown and that it would have been against its guidelines. But it neglected to mention how nervous the whole situation had actually made her because the nurses who cared for Duncan were never trained until the moment they had to suit up to actively care for him. Vinson told Matt Lauer in an interview this morning on "Today": "The first time that I put on the protective equipment, I was heading in to take care of the patient. We didn't have excessive training where we could don and doff, put on and take off the protective equipment, till we got a level of being comfortable with it. I didn't have that, and I think that's very important for hospitals across the nation, big and small. Once Nina came down with it, my contact at the health department called me and gave me a list of things to look out for, symptoms to look out for and numbers to call if I showed any symptoms. I never had a number to call the CDC directly. I would always call my contact at the health department. And then when I was in Ohio, and I was scheduled to leave, because I was so afraid of what could potentially happen, I did ask them, 'Is there anything that you guys can do to send for me? Do I need to leave earlier?' Because you know, I was worried." Lauer quickly reminded her of how the CDC allowed her to be painted as careless and foolish ,and it was obviously still a sore spot for Vinson, as she explained: "It made me feel terrible, because that's not me. I'm not careless. I'm not reckless. I'm an ICU nurse. I embrace protocol, guidelines and structure. Because in my day-to-day nursing, it is a matter of life and death. And I respect that fact. I would never go outside of guidelines or boundaries or something directly from the CDC telling me that I can't go, I can't fly."

  • Kaci Hickox, Nurse Tangled in Ebola Scandal, Breaks Quarantine after Insisting She Has No Symptoms, Ready to Go to Court to Fight for Human Rights

    Kaci Hickox believes the battle she is waging is not just about Ebola. She is the nurse who returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa just last week and, upon landing in Newark, New Jersey, she was taken to a medical detention center to be quarantined. The scuffle began because Hickox reportedly had an elevated temperature when arriving at the airport, and so she was immediately quarantined in a tent. Eventually, Hickox was allowed to leave and returned to her Fort Kent, Maine, home, where she is locked in a battle over whether or not she is a threat to the general public. She has broken quarantine and is willing to go to court over the matter.

  • 'The Bachelor's' Nikki Ferrell Has Finally Dumped Juan Pablo Galavis after Even 'Couples Therapy' Didn't Help Them

    It sounds like Nikki Ferrell finally got tired of waiting for Juan Pablo Galavis to tell her he loved her, because after several months of struggling the couple has reportedly split. While Ferrell may have been the one to receive that final rose in Season 18 of "The Bachelor," she never seemed that lucky to have beat out 24 other women in order to be with Galavis. The couple quickly moved on to do "Couples Therapy" on VH1, and it is on that reality show that viewers got a real idea of just how mismatched they actually were.
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