After seeing the jets crash into the World Trade Center over and over again from nearly every conceivable camera angle on September 11, I felt numb. The tragedy was too big for my mind to process. And then the evening news showed a remarkable bit of home video footage that brought the day into focus.

A young New York doctor had seen the attack on television and, thinking only of the lives at risk, grabbed some medical supplies and his video camera before driving to the World Trade Center. He was only a few blocks from one of the towers when it collapsed. “I hope I don’t die, I hope I don’t die,” he said to the camera as he crouched behind a car while a cloud of dust and debris fell toward him.

It was an eerie sight watching over the shoulder of someone who thinks he might die in the next few minutes. As the dust blacked out the screen, he apologized to his family for risking his life. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to help.”

“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism,” the poet John Keats wrote. There are few professions outside of health care where that is more true.

While most of us could not be on the front lines with the firefighters, police officers, doctors, and EMTs who rushed to the scene, we wanted to be.

As an industry, we did what we could. Manufacturers made donations to the rescue effort and included information about how to help on their Web sites. Apria, whose New York City branch associates witnessed the attack, gave supplies to the Red Cross and American Lung Association (see Industry News on page 16). New York home care providers, including Landauer Metropolitan Care and Homecare Concepts Inc, sent extra supplies to hospitals, and many HME providers in the state worked with home health agencies to prepare to transfer nursing home patients to home settings to free beds for the wounded.

Sadly, the thousands of casualties hoped for never materialized from the list of the missing. “I wish we had some great stories to tell, but it has been eerily quiet,” Tom Ryan, president of Homecare Concepts Inc, told the American Association for Homecare.

Those in the HME industry are often accused of being in it only for the profit. Politicians and journalists question the motives of providers lobbying for more home care spending. They do not know the heartache providers face when they are forced to discontinue a service because they can no longer provide it at a loss, or tell a patient that an item is not covered by his or her insurance.

“Everyone who works here comes in with a compassionate heart—I don’t think you would be in medical care unless you had that,” Kim Gordon, RN, told us in our profile of Providence Medical Equipment on page 80. Her company focuses on helping poor patients find community resources, such as local charitable institutions and social services, that can fill the gap between what Medicare will provide and what the patient needs. “We always talk about how we are here to serve the underserved, and to become the voice of the voiceless. That permeates the entire institution,” Gordon says.

While we may not risk our lives on video every day as the doctor in New York did, every time we do speak up on the benefits of home care for our patients who are too sick to speak for themselves or go the extra mile to make sure a patient’s needs are satisfied, we are all heroes.

For information on how you can help victims of the September 11 attacks, visit www.helping.org.