How did you become involved in canine search and rescue?
When we moved to a heavily forested area and got a Doberman for protection, I took the dog to obedience school. The instructor encouraged me to go to field tracking classes and I thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world, what dogs can do with their noses. I became a tracking instructor and got involved in police canine work.

My first experience in searching for someone was when an autistic girl in the area was thought to be lost. The police asked me to bring my smaller female dog to try to find her. It turned out the girl wasn't lost after all, but it was an interesting experience. I found it was a wonderful thing to be doing with my dogs instead of collecting ribbons [won for tracking competitions].

I started looking for any kind of search and rescue organization in Northern California. I joined a search and rescue unit in 1987. Now, I mainly work urban searches rather than wilderness ones. My husband and I work together on the California Task Force; he's a structural engineer.

What are some of the larger search and rescues you've been a part of?
I was at the Loma Prieta earthquake (near Santa Cruz, Calif.). Also, a rock slide in Yosemite National Park.

Probably the most significant time was when my husband and I went together to Mexico City in 1985. Up until then, I had mainly been on wilderness kinds of missions. Our dogs had had live finds and dead finds, such as people buried in mudslides. I had never experienced a really big incident like Mexico City. Going there from our affluent community of Palo Alto (Calif.), I was struck by the poverty. Not just the poverty, but also the lack of any kind of equipment to do recovery and rescue. It was extremely frustrating.

The dog would alert to tell me someone was buried in the rubble, and when I'd go back the next day to that site, people were still working at that spot. They would be using hammers and hacksaw blades, digging and trying to get the person out, with no equipment. It was a traumatic experience in that the rescue attempts were so ineffective.

We left Mexico City with a resolution that we were going to work really hard in the United States to make some kind of organized search and rescue happen. We've been part of the development of FEMA and its urban search and rescue response. Until 1990, the government had used FEMA only for recovery after an event.

After the government passed FEMA, it become more involved in helping to save lives. We've been very much a part of that. I teach classes and work as an evaluator for those learning how to do urban search and rescue.

Describe your most recent large-scale search and rescue involvement.
I went to the World Trade Center as a canine search specialist from Sept. 19 to Sept. 30. It's the biggest thing I've ever gone to. It was just mind-boggling.

I had worked at the Oklahoma City bombing site in 1995 and I thought that was horrendous. This was many more times so. There were so many buildings involved, so many people. Because of all the huge machines being used, the ground was trembling all the time. There was so much noise, you couldn't carry on a conversation. And there was the smell of the smoke and the decomposing human remains. It was a highly sensory experience.

Strangely enough, there wasn't a lot of rescue work. There weren't any live victims except for some firefighters who had gotten trapped while working in recovery. We worked 12-hour shifts, either day shifts or at night. I found that I did more therapy work with my dog than real search work. When I was waiting on standby, there was always somebody who needed to talk. They could always relate to the dog.

Eventually, my partner and I were asked to go to some of the fire departments and talk with firefighters who were really hurting. It was the first time I'd done that. All through my search and rescue career, I've kept a clinical distance from the families of the victims and those involved in the incident. But at the World Trade Center, I felt I had to [let people use my dog for stress relief]. They needed someone to reach out to.

I think we had a real impact on people. Even while I was standing on the rock piles waiting, firefighters would stop by and pet Sonny, my dog, and not say a word to me. Sometimes they did talk to me, and they were teary-eyed.

In what way has your nursing background intersected with your search and rescue work?
Like with nursing, I'm serving mankind. I've been able to deal with the stress by keeping the clinical distance. But I've never used nursing skills or knowledge while on search and rescue missions. I may help other searchers talk things through. I've taken a number of critical incident stress debriefing courses. I take them to keep up my skills to be a good listener and to do it intelligently.

What do you do to handle the stress and emotional effects of this kind of work?
I try to keep that clinical distance from it, but it keeps coming back with all the interviews I'm asked to do. But that's part of the process of dealing with it; it can't just be put in a box on a shelf. I talk things over with my husband, since we've both been to the events together. There's a pretty high percentage of people who get divorced when just one of them is involved in critical incident stress situations. Being able to talk about it together is healthy.

[The stress] affects my sleeping. I can often sleep only five hours, then I'm wide awake. I find I'm forgetting things. It's hard to settle into the normal routine of home life after coming back from something like the World Trade Center. It's strange to have been doing important things and then to come back to daily routines like doing the dishes.