Twenty-five years ago today, I was finishing a meeting in my office at Bellevue Hospital in lower Manhattan when a nurse told me that “a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers.” So began a horrific day that would take the lives of nearly 3,000 people, including two of my patients’ husbands and a friend, and shatter America’s sense of invulnerability. There are images from that day I will never forget. Among the most haunting for me were the hundreds of photographs of missing husbands, wives, sons, daughters, colleagues and friends taped to the fence outside Bellevue. For days, families came looking for people who would never come home. Yet I also remember something very different: extraordinary courage and selflessness. Firefighters ran up stairwells while thousands were running down. Police officers, health care workers, construction workers and ordinary citizens moved toward danger to help strangers. On Flight 93, passengers who realized their plane had been turned into a weapon acted together, sacrificing themselves to save others. And for a brief period, Americans who often disagreed remembered that what unites us is more important than what divides us. A quarter century later, that lesson seems especially relevant. September 11 reminds us what is truly important. No matter what health care or budget challenges we face, here @USFHealth, our highest goal remains Making Life Better. Our greatest strength is our people: the faculty member pursuing a discovery, the nurse comforting a frightened patient, the physician staying late to care for someone in need, the staff member solving a problem no one else sees, and the student or resident learning how to assume responsibility for another human life. Read more: bit.ly/4xT3s3j