Today was a pretty good day for me. I went to some lectures for CME, sat on the beach with some sangria, felt the sand between my toes, and felt the waves crash upon my skin. After dinner, my husband and I had ice cream, and as I’m writing this, I can hear the Gulf of Mexico sing its song.

However, today was not a good day for many of my former colleagues. And those would be journalists.

You see, I was one of those latecomers to the medical party. I decided to become a physician after I’d already been to college and graduate school and had a job in a completely different field.

I was a journalist – a photojournalist by training and desire.

Before you go thinking I was chasing celebrities around, that is NOT what a true photojournalist does. In fact, I decided to pursue medicine while covering tornado damage for a newspaper.

Visual journalists tell stories – not with a pen or keyboard, but with the eye and the camera. Nowadays, everyone who has a camera thinks they can do what I did, or what my former colleagues do, but that isn’t the case.

You can teach technical skills and pound basic science into someone’s head, but the art of medicine is a talent, a gift, just like the art of photojournalism. Photo­journalists tell stories not only with their cameras, but also with their hearts.

They sacrifice to bring the truth to light. And isn’t truth what we’re all seeking for our patients? For our readers? The truth about their world, and how it will change, and how we are going to help them through it.

A few weeks ago, I found out that the Times-Picayune (New Orleans), The Birmingham (Ala.) News, The Huntsville (Ala.) Times, and The Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register were going to be publishing 3 days a week. That meant massive layoffs.

Now, this has been happening at the newspaper my husband (who is also a photojournalist) worked at for the last couple of years. Every quarter we would hold our breaths to see if he would have to take a furlough (week off without pay) or just be let go. Luckily, I was out of residency when he got his pink slip.

Today I found out that many of the photographers and writers that I hung out with at football games, big courthouse scenes, and elections – and many who I idolized – were laid off. At the Times-Picayune, half of the newsroom staff was given a buyout or a severance package.

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.

To my former colleagues, there is life after the newspaper. Maybe it’s in another field. That worked out pretty well for me. Until then, take a little of your severance, find a good beach, and let it sing you its song. You may find your new path sooner than you think.

Dr. Bundy is an attending physician at ERMed, LLC, in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist, who not only sings in the car, but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.