In July, the mother of ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee will begin a three-year residency in family medicine at Trinity Health Medical Center in Muskegon, Michigan, The Washington Post reported.
The seed was planted in childhood. Stuck at home in Levittown, New York, recovering from mononucleosis, the 7-year-old Zuidgeest-Craft received a microscope as a gift, she told the Post. She became so absorbed studying mealworms and leaves under the lens that her mother, Paula Wesner, predicted her daughter would one day become a doctor.
Zuidgeest-Craft earned a nursing degree at Michigan State University and spent her career in neonatal intensive care, writing in a Stat News essay in April that the NICU "became my home" while she took premedical classes in the evenings. By her early 30s she had accumulated multiple nursing degrees and was raising two children, Ginger and Sean. She planned to enter medical school at 40, but divorced and remarried, then had two more children at ages 42 and 49.
The deferral seemed permanent, she thought, until 2020, when her second husband, Carl Craft, narrowly survived a brain hemorrhage. The couple revisited their bucket lists. Craft wanted to travel. Zuidgeest-Craft, then in her late 60s, said she wanted to go to medical school.
