Dr. Ohad Levi places a scalpel in the student’s gloved hand.
He watches closely as the student makes the first incision, a small cut signaling the start of a routine surgical procedure that will take roughly two hours.
On the table lies an anesthetized horse.
This scene, taking place in an operating room at the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, is a familiar one for Levi, an Israeli in a three-year residency at the school.
With every slice of the scalpel, he asks questions. He offers advice and assurance, his encouraging words breaking the silence within the room.
“You can do it,” he says. “Beautiful! Perfect!”
Levi is reluctant to turn his eyes away from the surgery. If either of the two students he is supervising — each in their fourth year of veterinary school — needs assistance, it’s his job to step in.
Levi’s hands are steady. His eyes are focused. His demeanor is calm. But that’s no surprise. He’s been doing this for years.
Levi used to be a full-time clinician, faculty member and head of the large animal department at the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine — Israel’s only veterinary school.
The S.F.-based Koret Foundation is its main backer, awarding several grants, as well as operating support and equipment purchases. The foundation also donates millions to the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
Levi performed many surgeries in Israel, but in 2007, the native of Haifa decided he wanted to advance his career in equine surgery.
So Levi decided to go back to school.
At 49, he is currently the oldest of eight equine surgical residents at U.C. Davis, which was ranked No. 3 on U.S. News and World Report’s list of top veterinary medicine schools in 2007.
Most of his fellow residents graduated from veterinary school in the past couple of years and are 20 to 25 years younger than him. The age discrepancy is of no consequence to Levi. He says “it was like winning the lottery” when he got into the U.C. Davis program.
“There are only a few places in the world where you can do equine surgery,” he says. “Davis was my top choice.”
When Levi completes his residency in 2010, he’ll be a board-certified equine surgeon.
One of the directors at the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine says it is quite rare for someone with Levi’s background to be chosen for a residency.
“His path is completely opposite to the usual route,” notes Dr. Niels C. Pedersen, who directs two units at the school, the Center for Companion Animal Health and the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory.
“He competed with a lot of highly promising, and much younger, applicants from around the world,” Pedersen says in an e-mail. “He was chosen by the residency selection committee because of his outstanding qualifications and obvious love of horses.”
The residency program at U.C. Davis is designed to provide three years of intensive training in the areas of equine surgery and lameness, an abnormality in a horse’s stride.
The majority of Levi’s work is clinical in nature. In addition to teaching and supervising veterinary students in a hospital setting, he receives instruction in basic surgery, lameness and equine practice techniques.
Levi says teaching is the easiest part of the program because of his previous experience as a member of the Koret School faculty in Jerusalem. The hardest part, he admits, was switching to English.
“I knew a little English when I came from Israel,” he says. “I also spoke Italian. It was my second language after Hebrew. But now it’s the opposite. My Italian is completely destroyed.”
Levi learned Italian around 20 years ago, when he was earning his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Turin.
He began dreaming of a career that involved horses not long after he started riding for pleasure at the age of 14 on Kibbutz Ashdot Yahakov.
That dream now has brought him 7,300 miles to Davis, where he awakens at 5 a.m. daily and leaves his home before sunrise. Even before officially starting his day at the equine clinic, Levi treats cases and preps for the day’s surgeries.
On Thursdays, new patients arrive and are placed in stalls next to a workout arena. At 9 a.m. sharp on those days, residents, veterinary students and equine specialists make their rounds. They pause in front of select stalls, assessing horses either awaiting surgery or in recovery.
One horse that competes in dressage, a discipline involving highly athletic movements, needs to be analyzed, so the cohort watches him trot back and forth. Levi surveys the horse’s gait, noticing lameness near its foot. The doctors confer, deciding on the first course of action: The horse will receive injections of anesthesia to block nerves and localize the pain.
Later that same day, while supervising his students in surgery, Levi receives word that another case is coming in: a Bay Area thoroughbred’s breathing is constricted when he races. Levi will use a laser to cut away excess tissue around the horse’s airway.
It’s the first time he’ll be doing such a procedure, and he’s excited. But it will have to wait. Levi is just too busy on this particular day.
On other workdays, Levi performs a multitude of tasks, such as tending to non-emergency wounds or taking horses to the lab for an MRI or CT scan. And there are always surgeries to be done; once, he performed seven during one shift.
Yes, it’s intense. Yes, he spends most of his time at the hospital. (Levi’s wife, Anat, his son, Hadas, 17, and daughter Noga, 7, live with him in Davis. His daughter Roni, 24, lives in Tel Aviv.)
But for Levi, it’s the best educational opportunity he could have.
“It’s a huge advantage to do the residency at Davis,” Levi says. “We have world-renowned surgeons and the caseload is quite big compared to other places.
“I practiced for years in Israel and did the surgeries, but never arrived at this level.”
In that regard, Levi wasn’t any different than other veterinary specialists in Israel. Graduates of the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, especially, needed to go to universities in other countries to take their skills to the next level.
So about 10 year ago, when the Koret School was “in its infancy and struggling to establish itself,” according to Pedersen, an endowment was created for graduates to do their residency programs at U.C. Davis.
“U.C. Davis was a natural choice,” Pedersen says. “The climates are similar, [as are] the livestock industries — especially dairy.”
Thanks initially to an endowment funded by the S.F.-based Koret Foundation, at any given time over the past decade several Israelis have been in residency at U.C. Davis.
Levi never imagined he’d be one of them, but he has known for a long time what he wanted to do.
“Since my first day as a student, I knew I wanted to do equine medicine and surgery,” Levi recalls. “I have dogs and cats, but the horse is something special for me … much more than any other animal. Their faces, their behaviors — I feel very close to them.”
After veterinary school in Italy, Levi interned for a year in Milan, then returned to Jerusalem to teach at the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine. He became the head of the school’s large animal department in 1997, and held the position through 2006.
While Levi has tackled his share of interesting cases during his career, the most compelling came in 2000 when he was part of a team that fit a crippled stallion with a prosthetic leg. An account of the surgery was published in the Israel Journal of Veterinary Medicine.
“It was the first time in Israel this was done,” Levi says. “Every time we can save a horse, it’s quite exciting.”
Exciting, yes, but after being “put in the trenches without a lot of formal training,” as Pedersen puts it, Levi decided to pursue the U.C. Davis residency.
“It is very satisfying to see someone who desired something so badly to be given his dream,” Pedersen says. “He obviously had to swallow some pride and admit that he was limited in his role as a veterinary academician in Israel by his lack of training.”
Upon completion of his residency next year, Levi plans to return to Israel, hoping to work at the Koret School or go into private practice. Already veterinarians in Israel have contacted him to request his surgical services.
Eventually, he’d like to get involved in Israel’s fledgling horse racing industry — as someone who protects horses and provides medical assistance.
“I became a professional equine surgeon so I could help these horses,” Levi says. “Horse racing is very similar to human athletics — the more you do, the more problems you have. I feel like that’s my goal, to solve them.”