It’s never too late to start – as a 72-year-old mom of four proved with her upcoming medical school graduation and start of a three-year residency.
Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft, the mom of ABC News meteorologist Ginger Zee, said that she decided to pursue her dream of going to medical school after her husband narrowly survived a brain hemorrhage in 2020. Now, she has completed the program and is ready for the next journey.
“It hit me like, ‘Oh, my God, this life is short,’” she told The Washington Post.
Zuidgeest-Craft and her husband, Carl Craft, had different ideas about what to do after the incident though. Carl wanted to travel, where Zuidgeest-Craft, then in her late 60s, knew that she wanted to study.
“He thought I was insane,” she said.
However, the pair were soon able to find a way to combine their two dreams. Zuidgeest-Craft decided to dip into her retirement funds to pay for the St. James School of Medicine in Anguilla.
At the end of May, she will receive a doctor of medicine degree and become her school’s oldest-ever graduate. In July, she will begin a three-year residency with a specialty in family medicine at a Michigan hospital.
“When you have to do it for work … you feel like, ‘I got to do this so that I can pay my rent,” she told The Washington Post. “I want to do this because I really enjoy this.”
Zuidgeest-Craft was joined by her husband during her clinical rotations in Chicago, West Virginia and South Texas.
During a rotation in McAllen, Texas, Zuidgeest-Craft was told by an attending doctor that she was too talented for her degree to simply be a “trophy.”
A month later, she found out that she had been accepted into a residency program at Trinity Health Medical Center in Muskegon.
In an article for the The Boston Globe, the 72-year-old wrote that she waited so long to go to medical school because of “life.”
After finishing her undergraduate degree, she had considered going to medical school. Instead, she married, had two children and became a neonatal nurse practitioner.
“At 35, I divorced, took the Medical College Admission Test, and applied to medical school but was denied,” she wrote. “At that time, I met my second husband. We married, and my youngest child was born when I was 49.”
By the age of 50, she assumed that her dream of becoming a doctor was “done.”
During an Entertainment Weekly interview, Ginger Zee said that her mother’s prior career had prepared her for medical school.
“I always say with tornadoes and meteorology, that when you go to school for it, it’s one thing, but when you storm chase, it’s another,” she said. “That’s how you learn how to be a great meteorologist.
“And I always use the analogy that if you had a doctor who had never worked on a patient before, you wouldn’t want that doctor, if they were only from a textbook,” Zee continued. “She already had 45 years of being in the hospital setting.”
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