Opinion: ‘I’m pretty much all in’: An interview with a woman starting medical residency at almost 73
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- Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft will turn 73 just one week after beginning her family medicine residency, after completing a Caribbean medical school (per the episode intro).
- Zuidgeest-Craft spent 45 years as a neonatal nurse practitioner — including pioneering work in the first-ever neonatal N.P. program — before finally pursuing the M.D. she'd wanted since her BSN undergrad years.
- Zuidgeest-Craft first applied to Michigan State's medical school at age 35 and was told to finish her organic chemistry and reapply, but a second marriage, a difficult pregnancy with her first daughter with her second husband, and fertility struggles that produced a second daughter via donor egg pushed the goal back decades.
- Zuidgeest-Craft's youngest daughter — now red-haired, blue-eyed, and described as looking 'not a thing like me whatsoever' thanks to anonymous donor eggs — just graduated from undergrad.
- Zuidgeest-Craft asked her own doctor to write a prescription for a one-hour daily nap to physically prepare for residency, and her physicians told her they 'all think I'm insane' — though some noted they still practice in their late 60s.
- Zuidgeest-Craft told host Torie Bosch she is 'a lot anxious' about residency hours, drawing on her experience doing 24-hour in-house call and 1980-era N.P. residency hours as a benchmark.
Why it matters: Zuidgeest-Craft's path — from a 35-year-old Michigan State applicant to a 73-year-old first-year resident — collides directly with the medical field's deeply entrenched age norms: her own physicians called the move 'insane,' yet several told her they still practice in their late 60s, illustrating the tension between the profession's training timelines and its actual working lifespan. The source makes clear the N.P.-to-M.D. leap was driven by decades of bumping against scope-of-practice limits in neonatal intensive care, not a midlife career change.
