Watching Dr. Rebecca Campbell perform surgery on a canine patient at Symphony Vet Center, her hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, is a good reminder of the skill and heart required to succeed in veterinary medicine. She’s at once confident, compassionate, and very, very competent. Embodying cool grace under pressure, Campbell clearly loves what she’s doing.
"I enjoy surgery very much," she says. "So much of my job involves talking with people and figuring out solutions to problems – not just medical puzzles, but solutions to challenging family situations. But when you do surgery, it’s much more basic. It’s handiwork rather than mental work, and you can really concentrate on one thing: the procedure."
Her destiny as a surgeon was stitched up in childhood. "I had a sewing machine as a young girl, and I sewed some of my own clothes," she recalls. "I also enjoyed carpentry, and I was the first girl in my elementary school to take a shop program. I used to build little chairs for my dolls, and I also sculpted wooden rabbits."
That experience prepared her well for the dexterity required in the operating room. "It takes precision and skill," explains Campbell, who has both. "You can’t be too rough or too tentative; either extreme is bad. If you’re too tentative, the patient will be under anesthesia too long, so you have to be more bold."
More and more veterinarians are choosing to specialize in one field of animal medicine; after graduating from Tufts and completing her internship at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Campbell had the opportunity to pursue an internal medicine residency at UPenn, but opted out in favor of running a general practice. Why? "Because I couldn’t stomach never doing surgery," she says. "Once you become a specialist you never pick up a scalpel again."
Analyzing non-surgical cases and discussing complications with patients’ owners can require mental gymnastics over long periods, whereas with surgery a vet can stay focused on one thing. "Surgery is a task that’s accomplished that day, and when you conclude the surgery you have a great feeling of accomplishment," Campbell concludes.
