Mother of ABC News chief meteorologist Ginger Zee to become medical school’s oldest graduate at 72

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.

“It hit me like, ‘Oh, my God, this life is short,'” she told the Post. “He thought I was crazy.”

Zuidgeest-Craft dipped into her retirement funds to enroll at St. James, which does not require the Medical College Admission Test, and Craft accompanied her for clinical rotations in Chicago, West Virginia and South Texas.

Despite being four or five decades older than most of her classmates, she bonded with them over morning yoga sessions on the beach and shared exam-week anxiety. She tutored younger students in anatomy and physiology, and she and Craft hosted movie nights showing 1980s films.

Zuidgeest-Craft, who has three grandchildren, said the difference between her earlier career and what comes next is motivation.

“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 Post. “I want to do this because I really enjoy this.”

Her 73rd birthday arrives in July, the same month her residency begins. She is already thinking about a goal beyond it: modernizing medical school curricula. “I feel alive,” she said, “when I work in the medical field.”