Kaci Hickox, who successfully challenged state’s restrictions on her movements, says ‘I don’t feel like I was given an option’

A nurse who successfully fought Maine’s quarantine for healthcare workers who have treated Ebola patients said she had no option but to challenge how medical professionals were being treated and is hopeful that others who return from west Africa will not face the same reaction.

Kaci Hickox said in an interview with the Maine Sunday Telegram she was fighting for the rights of other US medical workers who are trying to bring the deadly outbreak under control in west Africa.

After she arrived in Maine last week, state health officials went to court in an attempt to bar her from crowded public places. A judge ruled on Friday that she must continue daily monitoring of her health but can go wherever she pleases.

“I hope in six months aid workers returning back can be unnoticed,” she told the newspaper. “They won’t be in the media like I was, I hope. And they can walk into a grocery store and maybe no one even knows they were working in a country with Ebola, but one day I hope everyone can know and still smile at them in the grocery store. I know that won’t happen today.”

Hickox, 33, told the newspaper that she will respect the wishes of town residents and avoid going into town during the illness’s 21-day incubation period, which for her ends on 10 November. She was criticised by some who said she was not considering the public’s wellbeing by resisting the quarantine.

“I didn’t mean to bring this media storm on to this community, either, but I think unfortunately sometimes, especially when up against governors, you don’t always have an option,” she said. “I don’t feel like I was given an option.”

Hickox is originally from Rio Vista, Texas, and worked in Indonesia, Burma, the Darfur region of Sudan and Nigeria before returning to the US to earn master’s degrees in public health and nursing. She went to Sierra Leone this summer with Doctors Without Borders when the Ebola outbreak erupted.

She told the paper that she did not count the number of people who died, only the number of survivors: 39 during her time. But she still remembers the victims. On her last night in the country, she treated a little girl who did not survive.

“I don’t remember her exact age. I think she was 10, but to watch a 10-year-old die alone, in a tent and know there wasn’t anything you could do – it’s hard,” she said.