This year’s A to Z Issue celebrates people and businesses who have been successfully riding the turbulent waves of change and offering service and hope to the community at large. The print edition will be out in mid-July, but we’re teasing the content online, one letter at a time. 

We ran the now-iconic image above in our Spring Health & Happiness Issue without explanation. Here’s the story behind it: The couple, Mindy and Ben Cayer, are certified nurse anesthetists at Tampa General Hospital. Ben told a TGH videographer that they’d been arguing about “unimportant things” on the way to the hospital the day the photo was taken, but later — after doing “intubation after intubation after intubation,” said Mindy — they finally got a break. “At that point,” said Ben, “we’d just realized that all that stuff we were arguing about was trivial and that we were just grateful we were able to serve together as a couple.” The courage of dedicated medical professionals like these has been in daily evidence throughout the pandemic, their good work prompting generous gifts like that of Eddie and Candy DeBartolo, who gave $7.65 million to TGH, including $2.5 million toward treatment of patients with COVID-19. For the 15 hospitals in the BayCare Health System, from Morton Plant to St. Anthony’s to Winter Haven, the bywords are “Screening, Separating, Sanitizing and Safeguarding” — raising their already superb standard of care to an even higher level of excellence. And for those patients — particularly the youngest — who need care outside the hospital, it’s good to know there’s a resource like Sonas Home Health Care. In its more than 20 years of operation (including an expansion to the Tampa Bay area in 2011), its personnel — skilled nurses and nurses’ assistants certified to work with adults, children and the elderly — have more than lived up to the company’s goals of providing home care “that inspires people to live life to the fullest.”

Next: I is for Interior Design: Sprucing up our shelters, indoors and out