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New York|How Childhood Tragedy Shaped the Doctor Trump Picked for Surgeon General
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/nyregion/janette-nesheiwat-surgeon-general-shooting.html
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At the age of 13, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat said she accidentally knocked over a box in a darkened room. A handgun went off, leaving her father dead.
Dec. 6, 2024, 2:00 p.m. ET
Needing a pair of scissors, a 13-year-old girl went into the bedroom where her father was sleeping and reached for a fishing tackle box on a shelf above the bed. But in the darkened room, she accidentally knocked it over.
“Something fell out of it and there was a loud noise,” she recounted to the police. “I saw blood on my father’s ear.” On the floor was a .380 caliber handgun that had fallen with the tackle box and discharged. The girl’s father had been shot through the head. The local newspaper said the police believed it was a “freak accident.”
That terrible family trauma, which unfolded in the small Florida town of Umatilla in February 1990, set the girl on a new trajectory. It was because of this event, she has said, that she grew up to become a doctor. Saving lives, she thought, would help her cope with the pain and sense of helplessness she felt from her father’s death. Now she is poised to become the next surgeon general.
When President-elect Donald J. Trump announced he would nominate Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to be “the nation’s doctor,” as the office is sometimes called, he was making an unorthodox pick. Traditionally, the surgeon general has been selected from an impressive pool of public health officials, policy experts, renowned physicians or accomplished plague fighters.
Dr. Nesheiwat spent her career far removed from major research institutions, hospitals or medical schools. Instead, she was a working urgent-care doctor who has spent much of her professional life at CityMD, a for-profit chain of clinics that have sprung up across New York City over the last 15 years. And near the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Nesheiwat began regularly appearing on Fox News as a medical contributor.
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