On her road to becoming an ob/gyn, Dr. Melissa Scalera flirted with Vermont. First there was her undergraduate studies at Williams College just three miles south of the Vermont border in Massachusetts. She crossed the border for Chinese food, antiques and skiing. Later her residency was at Albany Medical Center in nearby New York.
Now she and her ski enthusiast family are thrilled to be calling Vermont home.
Dr. Scalera has joined Gifford Ob/Gyn & Midwifery in Randolph.
Originally from New Jersey, Dr. Scalera was the first person in her immediate family to attend college.
Her mother made a list of “academically acceptable” schools, starting with Harvard, that her daughter would be “allowed” to attend, Dr. Scalera recalls. Williams was on it. Scalera loved the school and everything about learning. Initially she thought that she’d major in Spanish literature or art history. “Choose something else” was her dad’s reply.
She graduated with a degree in psychology in the middle of a recession and applied for any and every job she could find. She took a position with a direct marketing company that made and sold leather bound books.
Hunched over a budget report one night at 10 p.m. at that long-ago job, she had an epiphany.
Unhappy stuck in a cubical all day, she wanted to be more active, look at fewer spreadsheets, see the sun and talk to people.
About the same time, she had seen an ob/gyn for a routine exam and blood work. The exam went well, but the follow-up appointment to go over the results of the blood work with a different doctor was less than stellar. He was cranky, didn’t listen and she left thinking “I can do better than that.”
Twenty-one and full of confidence, she called her mom and said, “I want to be a doctor.” She quit her job, moved in with her parents and did two years of post-baccalaureate studies in the pre-medical curriculum at nearby Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.
She went on to the New Jersey School of Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, earning her doctor of medicine degree in 1997. A four-year ob/gyn residency followed at Albany Medical Center in New York.
She spent the next 14 years working as an ob/gyn physician in the United States, in Washington, Texas, Oregon, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and in New Zealand.
Her work in New Zealand was meant to be a six-month adventure. She liked it so much she stayed seven years. Her role in New Zealand was that of a specialist. Midwives in New Zealand provide complete obstetric care for low risk births. General practitioners’ offices provide Pap smears and routine gynecologic care. Dr. Scalera consequently handled high risk maternity cases, colposcopy or abnormal Pap smears, and gynecologic surgeries.
“I basically backed up every mid-wife in town.”
“I think Gifford and Vermont are the closest to New Zealand that I’m going to get and still be in the continental U.S.,” says Dr. Scalera, who returned to the states to be near family but looked north for snow.
Dr. Scalera and her family, including her husband of 20 years, Bob Pressey, son Michael, 11, and daughter Catherine, 5, are living in Randolph, where they are loving the community and the school system. They hope to find an older home to buy within walking distance of Gifford.
“I think people are really, really nice, and already kids are coming over to ask if my son would like to come out a play,” says Dr. Scalera, remembering her own childhood of neighborhood children at play and wanting that for her family.
Dr. Scalera is board certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
She describes her bedside manner as “friendly.” “I like people and I love to talk,” she says. Her clinical interests include general obstetrics and gynecology.
“Gifford,” she says, is “a really fantastic match for me.”
Dr. Scalera is accepting new patients. Call her at Gifford Ob/Gyn & Midwifery at (802) 728-2401.
