CNN’s Sara Sidner: Why I Lost Her on Live TV

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I cried. I couldn’t control my tears. I couldn’t use my words.

It happened not only in public, but on CNN, in front of America and the world.

What moved me to tears was, at first, just rage. Rage against those who do not take our ills seriously and those who actively fight against the truth. They put people’s lives in danger.

I was on the air to talk about Juliana Jimenez Sesma. His story blew me away. She quit her real estate job to care for her mother, who suffered from lung disease. She didn’t want to do anything to expose her mother and stepfather to the coronavirus.

But in an underprivileged area of ​​Los Angeles, the whole family was infected, including Sesma’s brother and his family who lived next door. The younger ones survived, but Sesma lost her stepfather and then her mother within 11 days.

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

Sesma stood in front of me, a stranger, and told me her story. She was trying to be brave at her mother’s funeral, but how do you say goodbye to the most important person in your life in a parking lot? Then I didn’t let myself cry, I worked. But I let myself be seen, felt and heard as the mariachi band performed “Amor Eterno” or “Love Eternal”.

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

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

I have now been to 10 hospitals to try to deal with the pandemic. I have seen people writhing in pain, breathless and near death from Covid-19 in ICUs across the country. I have seen doctors and nurses exhausted on their faces still fighting as if the pandemic has just started, even though it is 12 months away.

And then, as I come home and stop to pump gas, someone rolls their eyes and asks, “Why are you wearing a mask? Like I’m the one crazy.

Listening to Sesma’s voice as the story aired long before dawn in LA, I realized that she would be waking up without her mother and stepfather due to the coronavirus. She will do this every day for the rest of her life. A double stroke of pain every day. Pain that can range from a burning agony to a dull ache, but it will never go away.

And then I thought about where she would wake up. In South Los Angeles, there are no convenient emergency care clinics. The community has 10 times fewer physicians per resident than the rest of California, director of Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital – the only facility that stands out in a health care wilderness, told me.

The large grocery chains that saturate other neighborhoods are absent in South Los Angeles. National drugstore branches have no sugar-free candy options, no low-sugar healthy bars. Just what rots your teeth and contributes to diabetes.

It may seem like an unimportant thing. It is not. The most common surgery performed at the community hospital is amputation due to diabetes.

Sesma’s stepfather suffered from diabetes and asthma. His mother has lung disease. Covid devours people who have these kinds of comorbidities. When the coronavirus first appeared, he found the perfect victims. But premature death is nothing new in South Los Angeles. Life expectancy 10 years ago – TEN YEARS! – less than the rest of the city of Los Angeles, the hospital chief told us.

When I come home these days there is no one to kiss or hold. I self-isolate to prevent any infection in my husband’s lungs in the best way I know – staying in another room, wearing a mask at home, and getting tested for coronavirus a few days after going to the hospital .

It’s lonely. But not as alone as having a family member die, infected because I was nonchalant in the face of dangers.

This is neither a joke nor a hoax. Prior to meeting Sesma, I had been to St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, a little out of town. It was yet another hospital filled with Covid patients and kind but exhausted doctors and nurses. I heard a patient cough and have trouble breathing – every gulp of air was a painful event. I did not see the patient, but my heart pounded and my eyes started to cry.

As I put the footage back to work, thinking again about how to tell the story of this hospital, to make people believe, I turned on CNN to see our world change.

It was January 6 and across the country in Washington was another murderous battle fueled by lies. A violent and uninformed crowd beat the doors of the United States Capitol, and they succeeded.

For years I have covered hate in this country. I was attacked by a neo-Nazi and spoke to several members of the KKK as well as white nationalists and men who call themselves the Proud Boys.
For years I’ve been saying some of these guys are talking about a civil war and they’re going to act at some point. People looked at me the same as the guy without a mask at the gas station. I was greeted with a roll of my eyes or a push that I exaggerated. And yet, there, before my eyes, an insurrection was unfolding. Rigid. Violent. And real.

I just wanted to scream. So few people thought this could happen in modern America, I have always feared it would. And I know it’s not over. Just as sure as the coronavirus is about to strike another destructive blow because of the Christmas and New Years festivities, militia members, white nationalists, Trump insurgents, conspiracy theorists and their supporters could deal another blow to American democracy as we know it.

So when you saw me cry, you witnessed my rage. I care about my country. I worry about the new and old ills we are facing. And I feel like my country is on life support.

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