No regrets: Texas nurse who got Ebola would treat again

Vinson appeared on the "Today" show to talk about what really happened in the days before she was diagnosed with Ebola. USA TODAY medical reporter Liz Szabo weighs in on the interview. (USA NOW, USA TODAY)

A Dallas nurse who contracted the deadly Ebola virus after treating the nation's only fatality said Thursday she has no regrets about treating Thomas Eric Duncan and would treat other Ebola patients.

"Nursing is what I do. I could never see a patient that needs help and not do everything I can to help them," Amber Vinson told NBC's Today show.

Vinson, 29, and Nina Pham, 26, were the two nurses at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas who contracted the virus while caring for Duncan, a Liberian national who died of the disease Oct. 8. Vinson fell ill a week later while visiting family in Ohio, but has recovered.

She initially came under fire for having flown to and from Ohio on a commercial plane.

"It made me feel terrible because that's not me.," she said. "I am not careless. I am not reckless."

Vinson emphasized her previous statements, confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that she was not sick when she flew — and that she had been given the OK to fly.

"I was never told that I couldn't travel. I talked to my (Intensive Care Unit) management team," Vinson said. "I talked to management in person and they said the CDC said it was OK for me to go."

Even in Ohio, she checked to ensure it would be OK to fly back to Dallas, she said.

"I'm an ICU nurse; I embrace protocol and guidelines and structure, because in my day-to-day nursing, it is a matter of life and death," she said.

Vinson said she was "floored" when she heard that Pham had become ill.

"I was afraid for myself and my family," she told Today. "I did everything I was instructed to do. I felt if Nina can get it, any one of us can get it."

Pham tested positive for the disease Oct. 12. She was flown by private medical flight to Maryland, where she recovered at the National Institutes of Health and was released Oct. 24. Vinson, who was treated at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, was released four days later.

Vinson told Today that she had very little training for treatment of Ebola in advance of treating Duncan.

"The first time that I put on the protective equipment, I was heading in to take care of the patient," she said. "We did not have excessive training where we could put on and take off the protective equipment, where we could get to a level of being comfortable with it. I didn't have that."