Victoria Campbell is, as she said yesterday, not a real nurse. A week ago she had not seen a human skull in surgery, assisted in amputations or dressed jagged gouges the size of her fist at the base of a man’s spinal cord. “I’d have been queasy just at the thought,” she said in a voice betraying her own disbelief at the time she has just spent in a Haitian hospital.

Islanders may know Ms. Campbell from her starring role in the Vineyard Playhouse’s holiday production last month; or from the film she debuted last summer, House of Bones, about the demise of her family’s West Chop home; or from seeing her grow up here, sometimes knocking about with her mother, Dolly Campbell, at the thrift shop in Chicken Alley.

No one who knows Tori, as she’s called, would mistake her for a nun — “ever,” she said. Yet yesterday, just back in New York, she held the rosary she’d been advised to carry into ravaged Haiti a week ago.

She had left New York with a friend, a camera wrapped in a towel, two suitcases packed with peroxide, gauze, antibiotic creams and tampons, the ability to speak a few languages, and an inexplicable desire to go to a country she’d not been to before, to witness what was happening after the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

What she did not have was a real plan. Volunteer programs were advising people not to go. “It was my father [Bruce Campbell], who said, ‘Goddamn it, get down there and help. You speak French . . . and you don’t have a full-time job,’” she said.

He bought their cheap tickets to the Dominican Republic, the country which shares Haiti’s island, and soon serendipitous connections helped fulfill Ms. Campbell’s hopes of getting in and being useful. The grandson of former Haitian president Dumarsais Estimé, a college acquaintance of her traveling companion, met with the two women during their layover in Fort Lauderdale. A high school friend now in the Dominican Republic offered a bed and support. “You want to look nonthreatening, so we had rosaries and we wore skirts and kerchiefs on our heads . . . which is why the Haitians stamped us as ‘religioso’ — sisters, nuns,” laughs Ms. Campbell.

Rocking Saturday’s benefit at Che’s Lounge. — Anthony Esposito

“I really didn’t want to go and be of no help, a burden, an extra mouth to feed,” she said. “We knew we had to bring our own food and water. I just really wanted to feel it and see it and tell some sort of story. I didn’t realize how needed we would be.”

Through friends and Facebook, they found a contact at Saint Damien’s Hospital, a free pediatric hospital in Port-au-Prince, run by Father Rick Frechette, an American doctor who’d been working in the slums there for over two decades. “The woman there said, ‘Come, we need you, bring your own water, you can sleep on floor.’ ”

The bus trip from Santo Domingo was 10 hours and harrowing; without electricity, Haitians at the squalid border checked their passports with flashlights. Then they began seeing the results of the earthquake.

“It was massive human chaos as I have never witnessed,” Ms. Campbell said. “I thought, oh my God, what are we getting into? We don’t have a solid plan. There were people begging everywhere, taxi drivers yelling, film crews, and I had this wild feeling of not knowing where to go.”

A French journalist and his driver, a Haitian who had been studying theology in Montreal until his mother and sister died in the earthquake, took them through the destruction, past United Nations tanks, heavily armed U.S. soldiers, Blackhawk helicopters overhead, to Saint Damien’s.

“We went through this huge gate and there was just a mass of patients, all over the yard, tent setups everywhere, people running all over the place, doctors in scrubs,” she said.

Ms. Campell nursed the gravely and mortally injured and held their hands, comforted their families. She translated for French, Italian and American doctors in surgery. She successfully urged former Sen. John Edwards to use his clout to Medivac patients whose spinal cord injuries would otherwise have been fatal. She was a real nurse.

Yesterday, suddenly back in New York, she was showered, trying to find her bearings — and deciding how and when to go back. “I fell so in love with the Haitians. My heart felt so broken and so hollow yet so much more full of love. I couldn’t break down, I just had to hold them and love them . . . and hold their stories,” she said.

Ms. Campbell directs anyone who can donate money to compassionweavers.com/donate.