She spent a month at the end of 2010 caring for yellow fever patients through Doctors Without Borders, a group she had worked with several times before. She had long been passionate about providing medical care overseas, her classmate Chelsea Solmo said.
“It was more than just a hobby or an interest,” Ms. Solmo said. “She had these skills as a nurse, and she felt she had to use them.”
For the last month, Ms. Hickox, 33, was with the group in Sierra Leone, working with Ebola patients. She arrived back in the United States on Friday at Newark Liberty International Airport on the same day that the governors of New Jersey and New York began a mandatory quarantine for medical workers returning from West Africa, and became the first person affected by the new policy.Frustrated that she was quarantined, even though she had no symptoms, Ms. Hickox took to national television on Sunday to criticize Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey about the policy.
Ms. Hickox’s friends and family were not surprised that she decided to speak up.
“She’s not a loudmouth activist,” said Dr. Nora Rowley, a classmate at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. “But she understands the contagiousness of the virus, and now she has to come back and be subjected to a policy that’s not based on anything other than fear.”
Her boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, a nursing student in Fort Kent, Maine, said that Ms. Hickox, who is being kept in an isolation tent with a portable toilet, but no shower or television, had not planned on speaking to the news media but changed her mind after Mr. Christie said on Saturday that she was “obviously ill” when she knew she was not.
“Now he’s messed with the wrong redhead,” he said of her frame of mind.
Ms. Hickox first shared her story on Saturday in an essay on the website of The Dallas Morning News. At the airport, a forehead scanner showed she had a temperature of 101, but she said that was because she was flushed and upset. A later reading by an oral thermometer recorded a normal temperature of 98.6.
On Sunday, Ms. Hickox told Candy Crowley of CNN that she did not have a fever or any symptoms and felt “physically strong.”
Ms. Hickox attended high school in Rio Vista, Texas, a small town near Dallas, and studied nursing at the University of Texas at Arlington. The first time she applied to work at Doctors Without Borders, the group told her she did not have enough international experience. So she went to work for another organization, the International Medical Corps, in Indonesia.
“While the work there was difficult and challenging, both professionally and emotionally, it also made me feel alive in a new way,” she wrote in an alumni profile on the university’s website.
She eventually worked for Doctors Without Borders in Myanmar for two years. She managed three rural clinics that served about 100,000 people near the border of Bangladesh, the group said in an online post about her time there. She later worked for them in Sudan and Nigeria.
After receiving her master’s degree in nursing and public health in 2011, she moved to Las Vegas to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of an epidemiology fellowship.
Her mother, Karen Hickox, said she worried for her daughter’s safety when she told her she was going to Sierra Leone.
“Kaci’s passion is serving others,” she said. “Of course, I’m a mother, so I was scared to death. I worried that she could come down with the disease herself.”
Before she was quarantined, Ms. Hickox planned to return home to Maine, where she had been living with her boyfriend and looking for a job, to recuperate from the grueling trip and to monitor herself for possible Ebola symptoms, her family said.
On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York came to her defense, calling her a hero and saying that the way she had been treated was shameful.
Ms. Hickox said in a brief statement on Sunday night: “My human rights have been violated and we must react in order to ensure that other health care workers do not endure such injustice.”
