Earlier today we published a post on the 60 Minutes profile of Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters that aired last night. In the course of watching that segment, I caught another 60 Minutes report that aired last night — one on the four Dallas nurses who cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first and only patient to die from Ebola in the U.S. Watching the report by Scott Pelley, you really get a sense of how selfless and heroic these people are/were. Imagine being a nurse and showing up for work in the Dallas suburbs one day and being told that you’re being charged with caring for someone with a lethal, highly contagious, mysterious disease like Ebola. I’d probably rip off my scrubs and run out of the building.
“I went over and met with a nurse who gave me a report. She also went over the protective gear that we would be wearing that night. She gave, you know, finished briefing me on what was going to happen, and I literally burst out in tears,” Sidia Rose told Pelley in the report. “It’s very scary. I know about Ebola, and the only reason I do, it’s because I’ve been just researching it on my own. Since January, I kept hearing the word popping up in the news. And I just wanted to find out about it…I was very frightened. I was. But I just dried my tears, rolled down my sleeves, so to speak, and went on about my night…As a nurse, I understand the risk that I take every day I come to work and he’s no different than any other patient that I’ve provided care for. So, I wasn’t going to say, ‘No, I’m not going to care for him.'”
Nurse John Mulligan described the moments just prior to the intubated Duncan’s death, as well the time of his passing. His account is heartbreaking.
“He was on a lot of medication to support his blood pressure and his circulatory system. And he was heavily sedated and he had tears running down his eyes, rolling down his face, not just normal watering from a sedated person. This was in the form of tears,” Mulligan said. “And I grabbed a tissue and I wiped his eyes and I said, ‘You’re going to be okay. You just get the rest that you need. Let us do the rest for you.’ And it wasn’t 15 minutes later I couldn’t find a pulse…He did not want us to shock him if he went into a lethal rhythm because he knew that that would put him at a higher risk. And that was a conversation he had with one of my pulmonologists that was on his case. And the three of us in that room chemically coded him. I pushed the drugs, knowing they weren’t going anywhere and I lost him. And it was the worst day of my life. This man that we cared for, that fought just as hard with us lost his fight. And his family couldn’t be there. And we were the last three people to see him alive. And I was the last one to leave the room. And I held him in my arms. He was alone.”
God bless nurses, man.
