Previous Ankota articles such as Managing Home Care in a Storm and Post Acute Care Operations in a Storm focused on leveraging technology to better manage operations during emergencies like hurricanes and blizzards. All too often, storms like Sandy force home care operations "off the grid" and technology fails the business. The best stories and most inspiring stories, however, are about the human side of things and can only come out later. As with the following piece about the dedication of private duty home care aides working in the aftermath of Sandy in New York, they renew our spirit and remind us about what is special about those who work to take care of patients and clients in their homes.

If you have a story about an extraordinary home care worker, we'd love to hear about it. Contact us using one of the blue buttons below or contact will.hicklen@ankota.com to tell us about your Home Care Hero.

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By Gail Sheehy, this piece ran in the Daily Beast. Gail Sheehy is the author of 15 bestselling books, including the revolutionaryPassages. Her most recent book is Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence 

The real test of the army of caregivers for tens of thousands of seniors trapped at home when Hurricane Sandy slammed the East Coast began the day after the storm ended. Eloise Goldberg, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York supervisor for the Bronx and half of Long Island, stepped out of her home about 50 miles east of New York City on Tuesday morning, jumped into her car (her husband’s was crushed beneath an oak tree), and began to figure out how to get 11,000 home health aides and 3,500 clinicians to their patients. “We had been preparing our field staff for several days so they would have cellphone connections with their patients, but now we were up against massive flooding and blackouts and fires.”

On the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, where the Atlantic had cut through to join Jamaica Bay, nurses had begun to call Goldberg’s cell during the height of the storm on Monday. One nurse said she was wading in to reach trapped patients. She walked seven blocks through knee-high water to get to a group home and found medicines had been washed away. She would get prescriptions refilled and return, she promised. But by afternoon, downed wires sparked fires that eventually consumed 60 houses. By nightfall, more than 100 homes were destroyed. Many patients who had refused to evacuate were desperate to escape floodwaters that were climbing past the first floors. Each nurse on Goldberg’s Long Island team was reporting that they couldn’t find several patients. “The majority of our patients have been very calm through the hurricane,” Goldberg told me on Wednesday. “But if this continues—the blackouts, the lost power for communication, no water supply—I anticipate a very different reaction.”