Get to know ... Jenny Llacer (Feb. 2006)

We’re all used to seeing Jenny Llacer sailing smoothly across the BMT unit from one acutely ill patient to another. We just never knew she could also sail between Fiji and Tonga.

Jenny’s done just that, not to mention the Mediterranean and the Panama Canal, in her family’s glamour-free boat. She navigated along with her step-father and other two or three crew.

Along the way, she rejoiced in four-hour sentinel watches on the most wide-open brilliant seas – no call light rings, no beeping IV pumps, no cardiac monitor alarms.

Jenny has always been a coastal girl. She grew up chasing crabs in the West Coast beaches of Southern California and had her share of ocean views when her father’s physics research moved the family to Long Island. There were frequent childhood visits to her father’s native Spain and her mother’s homeland in The Philippines. Back on this coast, Jenny studied biology at UC-Santa Cruz – “a radical surf town, a little empty-headed and a little politically engaged. I felt comfortable there.’’

But she felt a little isolated in her first career, cloning orchids for a commercial grower. Her favorite was a three-pedaled, fluorescent orchid from the mountains of South American called Masdevallia. The job required Jenny to spend hours cultivating orchid seeds, as tiny as dust particles, in sterile dishes. Lots of labor, little pay, but very peaceful. Her work among the orchids allowed Jenny many hours of meditation and sailing through the green. “I walked through a fantasy,’’ she recalled, “but the plants didn’t talk back. They were slow growing and I wanted to run.’’

So Jenny headed east again, earning her second bachelor’s, this time in nursing in New Jersey. With a goal to work with elderly patients, to soak up their wisdom, she accepted a job in oncology at the University of Pennsylvania. Then her husband-to-be Paul’s desire to head back to the West Coast got the new couple as far as Chicago for another stop – and a wedding in which Jenny donned a $39 white summer dress she found on sale just before the ceremony.

The couple and their daughter Isabel moved to California in 1999. Jenny’s been working at Stanford since then. Now that her daughter is 7 years old, Jenny is nurturing dreams to sail again, this time with husband and daughter in tow – “if Trisha lets me go,’’ she says with a witty smile, for a taste of adventure this summer to explore French Polynesia.