O.C. Nurse to Help Families of Oklahoma Bomb Victims : Rescue: Red Cross veteran will try to console those who lost loved ones and those who struggled in vain to save them. Others in county are helping in other ways.

Judy Tuohey, a registered nurse from Laguna Hills, boarded a plane Tuesday for Oklahoma City to join the Red Cross effort to help families who lost loved ones in the bombing of the federal building there.

“This horrendous thing is made even worse because someone caused it,” said Tuohey, 58, who has assisted victims of 20 natural disasters. “It is so incomprehensible that someone or several people could hurt so many without even caring, having never met them.”

While Tuohey is the only Orange County Red Cross volunteer who has been recruited to Oklahoma City, other county residents are offering other forms of assistance.

On Tuesday, Laguna Beach resident Donna Jackson set up a trust fund to raise money to buy an artificial limb for Dana Bradley, 20, whose leg was amputated to free her from the bombed-out building where she had been trapped.

Jackson said Bradley is a stranger she has seen only on news programs, but she feels a special empathy for her.

“I used to design artificial limbs for children. I know what this woman is going through,” said Jackson, a former prosthetist.

An Oklahoma City native, Jackson said her father lost a leg during World War II. When she saw pictures of the bombing last week, “it looked just like a war zone,” she said. “It made me think of him.”

Jackson, who has opened the trust fund in Bradley’s name at a Great Western Bank in Huntington Beach, said she hopes to raise at least $10,000 for an artificial limb for Bradley, whose two daughters, ages 3 years and four months, are missing in the rubble.

Since the bombing in Oklahoma, the Red Cross switchboard in Orange County has lit up with calls from people wanting to make blood donations, Red Cross spokeswoman Kara Lakkees said.

“People have been giving blood like crazy,” she said, even though they have been told that Oklahoma City currently does not need the blood, which may be used locally instead.

So far, the Orange County Red Cross organization has received $14,153 in contributions earmarked for Oklahoma, Lakkees said.

It would be better, she said, if future checks were made payable to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund so that surplus money could be funneled to other disasters as needed.

As rescue efforts continue in Oklahoma City, Tuohey, a disaster mental health coordinator for the American Red Cross, said she expects to be on the scene to ease the anguish of relatives as more bodies are removed from the bombing site.

Tuohey said these people need the skills of the more than 250 experienced mental health workers the Red Cross has sent to the disaster scene from across the nation.

Another part of her job, she said, will be to console rescue workers, who have had to crawl over dead bodies in an often fruitless search for the living.

“Even the (rescue) dogs are dispirited,” Tuohey said, because of the small number of live victims they have detected after many hours of hunting.

Accounting for the dead bodies as they are retrieved from the building, Tuohey said, will help bring “closure” for families who have been going through denial.

“At first they say, ‘My husband is going to walk out of there any minute,’ and then they start making bargains with God,” she said. “Then there is anger or depression. Often they think they are going crazy.”

She said she will assure those who are grieving that their feelings are normal. “Abnormal behavior in an abnormal situation is normal,” she said.

And she said she will encourage them to vent their feelings. “We tell them it is OK to cry, it is all right to be angry,” she said, likening the relief they will find to letting the air out of a beach ball.

Tuohey, who works as a medical consultant, said that after arriving Tuesday night in Oklahoma City she would immediately check in at Red Cross headquarters, where she would be briefed and receive an assignment.

She said she will work at the disaster scene for 10 days, “which is about as much as you can take.”

“We cry too,” she said. “You see things you wish to God you hadn’t seen . . . and things come up in your dreams.” She said during such disasters the mental health workers also take care of one another.

The “happy side,” she said, is “I know we make a difference. You come back feeling good about what you have done.”