Heather Miller was on Route 322 headed home toward Mechanicsburg, stressing about her degree from Penn State University in business and art and how it wasn’t what she wanted to do anymore.

All of a sudden, she came upon an accident that had just happened. One vehicle swerved off the road, hitting a guide rail. The other overturned and the driver was slowly pulling himself from the wreck. In the first car, sat an older female driver who had seat-belt burn and the airbag had deployed. She was cold and in shock. So Miller pulled some of the newly-cleaned towels out of her laundry basket and wrapped her up, keeping her company until emergency personnel arrived.

Back in the car, she called her friend who was a pharmacist – to relay the story of what just happened and just talk about how powerful it felt just to be there and help in any way possible. Having worked as a pharmacy technician in high school, could there be a future in medicine, she wondered. And around 2 a.m. one morning, she found a website talking about nurse practitioners and physician assistants. A light bulb went off.

After finishing PA school at Penn College (where her father teaches) in 2014, Miller worked as a hospitalist – doing internal medicine for patients at University of Maryland Medical Center. There, she worked with case managers and behavioral health to provide overall care for those in the hospital with other issues. That’s one of the things that would later excite her about Family First Health.

From there, she worked at Express Care in Hanover until a day when her fiance stumbled across a job at Family First Health. He’s also a PA, but the job asked for experience, and he had just graduated. So he told Miller about it, encouraging her to apply. She did her research and did, and now she’s going to be the second provider at Family First Health’s new Columbia Center. Though she won’t admit it was because of him.

It was Family First Health’s dedication to coordination of care that had Miller excited to become a part of the team. “Especially for that population,” she said. “They need assistance but don’t know how to get or sometimes that it even exists.” When she was working at the hospital, people would come in as they were falling apart, and FFH’s goal is to reduce that by working on preventative, overall care, she said.

When she’s not working (or planning her May wedding), Miller spends her free time sleeping,cooking, attending PSU football games, visiting family and friends and touring wineries. She enjoys going to the gym and has taken on running. She recently completed a few virtual 5Ks for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

When Marie Kellett was in college, she went on a spring break trip to southern Virginia. She met a man who’s source of running water was a stream that went through his house. His chair was a wheelbarrow. And his medication sat in a bucket on the table.

“People were living in places that should have been condemned,” she said. And physicians were more than an hour’s drive away.

It was that trip that led Kellett to the decision that she would be a doctor. It might have been bouncing around in her head, as her dad is a dentist and her brother is also in family medicine. (In fact, the brother and sister went to the same college, medical school and did their residency in the same town. But we’ll come back to that later.)

Dr. Kellett joined Family First Health this month and will lead our Columbia practice in Lancaster County. While Columbia is not the Appalachia, Kellett said there’s a definite need. She worked there for three years before she was married – you might recognize her maiden name VandenBosche.

Kellett wasn’t always sure she wanted to be in family medicine. She actually somewhat followed her brother’s footsteps. Her school didn’t really encourage family medicine, but her brother did go that route. Her brother did his residency in Lancaster, and many people encouraged her to just check it out. So Kellett did a month’s rotation there, giving them the benefit of the doubt. She left on a Friday in October 1996.

Two days later, she was hit by a drunk driver.

She would lose her leg as a result of the accident. She had more than 40 units of blood transfused. She underwent 12 surgeries. While many med school students use their two months time off for vacation and interviews, Dr. Kellett would spend hers in the ICU for a month and then in rehabilitation. After the accident, she received an outpouring of love and concern from those she worked with during her Lancaster rotation. Turns out people were right to recommend it to her. She interviewed for her residency while still in a wheelchair.

“I’m a better doctor because I was a patient,” Dr. Kellett said, adding she came out of med school in a different place than her classmates. She was resolved to be a great physician because she saw some not so great ones while she was a patient.

The rest is history.

Well, the rest is actually residency, three years in Columbia and Wrightsville, getting married, and then 13 years in York. How did she end up at Family First Health? A friend – Dr. Debra Bell – told her to take a look. Dr. Kellett was excited about the opportunity for a few reasons. She sees the smaller office a chance to impact more lives and the community more directly. Plus if she sees something that needs change, she’s in a better place to affect that change. She loves that people are happy to come to work every day. She loves our ideals and mission, and she’s really excited to start the Columbia practice from scratch.

When she’s not working, Dr. Kellett keeps pretty busy. Her husband, Tom, works at the Catholic Harvest Food Pantry and works mornings (she works afternoons). They have five boys. (Even their dog is a boy, she joked.) The boys range in age from 1.5 to 10 years old. The oldest, Manuel, they adopted from Guatemala. They’re very active in their church St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. The boys go to school there. She loves to travel. She did two mission trips to Haiti – though they travel less now with the kids. She loves far-away locations like Fiji and Thailand. She’s the coach of her son’s 10 and under soccer team, which she’s done since they were an 8 and under team.

She also takes part in York County’s Victim Impact Panel for those going through the ARD program for first-time DUI offenders. Four to five times a year, she speaks to the groups about how drunk driving changed her life, hoping to inspire them to make whatever changes they need to stay on track.