Sara Sidner from CNN: Why I Lost It on Live TV

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I cried. I couldn’t hold back my tears. I couldn’t use my words.

It happened not only in public, but also on CNN, for America and the world.

What brought me to tears at first was just anger. Anger at those who don’t take our ills seriously and those who actively fight the truth. They endanger people’s lives.

I was on the air to talk about Juliana Jimenez Sesma. Her story knocked me down. She left her real estate job to care for her mother, who suffers from a lung condition. She didn’t want to do anything to expose her mother and stepfather to the corona virus.

But in a deprived Los Angeles neighborhood, the whole family became infected, including Sesma’s brother and his family next door. The younger children survived, but Sesma lost her stepfather and then her mother in 11 days.

I met her at her mother’s funeral. It was a very disturbing scene. An open chest in the corner of a parking lot – the only place available and safe for people to gather – with flowers perched on the tarmac below.

Sesma stood before me, a stranger, telling me her story. She tried to be brave at her mother’s funeral, but in a parking lot, how can you say goodbye to the most important person in your life? Then I wouldn’t let myself cry, I was working. But I let myself see, feel and hear it while the mariachi band played “Amor Eterno” or “Love Eternal”.

Right, Juliana Jimenez Sesma had to hold her mother's funeral in a parking lot.

I can’t tell you what a punch in the face it is to constantly experience two distinctly different worlds in one beautiful but imperfect America: one based on reality, the other on conspiracy and tribalism.

I have now been to 10 hospitals to fight the pandemic. I have witnessed people writhing in pain, gasping for breath, and near death from Covid-19 in ICUs across the country. I have seen doctors and nurses with exhaustion all over their faces who were still fighting as if the pandemic was just starting even though we are now 12 months left.

And then, as I go home and stop to accelerate, someone rolls their eyes at me and asks, “Why are you wearing a mask?” Like I’m crazy.

When I listened to Sesma’s voice as the story played on the air in LA long before dawn, I realized she would wake up without her mother and stepfather because of the coronavirus. She will do this every day for the rest of her life. A double dose of pain every day. Pain that can go from a burning pain to a dull pain, but it will never go away.

And then I thought about where she would wake up. There are no convenient emergency care clinics in South Los Angeles. The community has 10 times fewer physicians per capita than the rest of California, I was told by the head of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital – the only facility that stands out in a desert for healthcare.

The big supermarket chains that saturate other neighborhoods are missing in South LA. National pharmacy branches have no sugar-free candy options, no low-sugar health bars. Just the stuff that makes your teeth rot and contributes to diabetes.

That may seem insignificant. That’s not it. The most common procedure in the community hospital is amputation for diabetes.

Sesma’s stepfather had diabetes and asthma. Her mother, a lung condition. Covid devours people with these types of comorbidities. When the coronavirus surfaced, it found the perfect victims. But premature death isn’t new in South LA. Life expectancy there is 10 years – TEN YEARS! – less than the rest of the city of Los Angeles, the hospital chief told us.

These days when I come home there is no one to hug or hold. I isolate myself to keep any infection out of my husband’s lungs in the best way I know how – staying in another room, wearing a mask at home, and getting a coronavirus test a few days after I go to the hospital.

It’s lonely. But not as lonely as the death of a family member, infected because I was careless about the dangers.

This is not a joke and not a hoax. Before meeting Sesma, I had been to the St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, a little out of town. It was another hospital full of Covid patients and gracious but exhausted doctors and nurses. I heard a patient coughing and having trouble breathing – every gulp of air a painful event. I didn’t see the patient, but my heart was pounding and my eyes watered.

When I got the footage back to work and rethought how to tell the story of this hospital, to make people believe, I pushed CNN to see our whole world change.

It was January 6 and across the country in Washington was another deadly battle fueled by lies. A violent, misinformed crowd slammed into the doors of the Capitol, and they succeeded.

For years I have covered hatred in this country. I was attacked by a neo-Nazi and talked to several members of the KKK, as well as white nationalists and the men who call themselves the Proud Boys.
I’ve been saying for years that some of these guys are talking about civil war and they are going to do something at some point. People looked at me the same way as the maskless man at the gas station. I got an eye roll or push back that I was overdoing. And yet there, before my eyes, an uprising unfolded. Stark. Violent. And really.

I just wanted to scream. If few thought this could ever happen in modern America, I always feared it would. And I know it’s not over yet. Just as surely as the coronavirus is poised to deliver another devastating blow to the revelry of Christmas and New Year, militia members, white nationalists, Trump insurgents, conspiracy theorists, and their supporters can deal another blow to American democracy as we know it .

So when you saw me cry, you witnessed my anger. I care about my country. I am concerned about the new and old ailments we are facing. And I feel like my country has life support.

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