You manage to talk out what you've been through, there are visual memories that stay with you, there are odors, sounds that will stay with you. It's not much different than a lot of your veterans coming back from Vietnam had, or the Gulf War. These feelings are tempered with the knowledge that finding a body isn't a failure. What people don't understand is that a lot of the work we do is to bring closure to the families. Search the University and Main archives for previously run articles.
Some scenes are more challenging than others.
It's physically demanding work. She has special skills developed in rock climbing and spelunking and keeps her edge by walking her dogs, which in her case means three walks, four times a day. Working earthquakes can also be dangerous, as she learned in 1986 when she and a team of workers and her dog Aly were searching for a body in the basement of a collapsed hotel in El Salvador. I remembered seeing the ceiling where Aly had alerted on blood had completely collapsed, and my first reaction was 'where's my dog, oh my God where is my dog. After a few tense moments, Aly came to the rescue, his master providing the psychological boost of a live find.