These were people who covered Hurricane Katrina (and won two Pulitzer Prizes for that coverage). In Alabama, many of the journalists were honored for their coverage of the tornadoes of April 2011. Through their efforts, cities were reborn, their stories told to the world.

I hear a lot of physicians, old and young, comment about other people’s jobs as if they’re not as important as being a doctor. I know that what I do is important. I know it carries a lot of risk (both physical and legal), and I know if I’m not there in the middle of the night, people would die.

However, what other people do is important. Since I’m paying homage to my former colleagues, you would be surprised by the risks they take to bring you the stories that change one person’s life, or maybe change the world.

I’ve had a gun pointed at me, chased “perps” down alleyways (when I was riding with the cops), and once sat outside a gang funeral just in case something would happen. My husband wandered around post-tornado Tuscaloosa so he could bring what happened there to the world. When he was covering the cops in a small town in Mississippi, they gave him a bulletproof vest “in case.”

We’ve both worked every holiday and weekend day, and gone without food and sleep. We’ve carried ungodly amounts of equipment miles in the rain or 100 degree heat or freezing cold.

And I haven’t even started talking about the combat photographers, like Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, who brought us the horrors of the Vietnam War. Or Margaret Bourke-White, who showed us the survivors of Auschwitz. Or Lewis Hine, who told the story of child labor in the early 20th century.

So photojournalists have told the stories of America, the stories of the world, for more than 100 years. Many have died for their efforts.

It isn’t much of a coincidence what attracted me to emergency medicine. Like photojournalists, we take risks to get to the truth. We never know what’s going to come through the door, we know a little about a lot, we like to use our hands, and we are on medicine’s front lines. I’m proud of that, just as I was proud to be a photojournalist, for exactly the same reasons.

So Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, and New Orleans, you have lost a great deal of talent today. You have lost those who have been telling your stories, some for more than 40 years.