Physician Assistant Nicole Havel, 46, decided it was time to make a change in her practice as a P.A.
    Since moving to Florida with her family in 2011, the Sioux Falls, S.D., native worked with doctors practicing interventional spine and pain management care.
    She said she had a long-time interest in dermatology and was going to make a switch to that field.
    Ironically, her certification test was cancelled due to the hurricane that hit Florida.
    Then she got a random e-mail from a recruiter about a job opening in Nebraska that piqued her interest.
    One thing led to another and now she’s the newest member of the medical team at Chase County Community Hospital and Clinic.
    She and Todd Schaufenbuel, and their two daughters, arrived in Imperial in late October. Halloween was the girls’ first day of school in Imperial.
    After graduating in 2000 from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, she wanted to go into P.A. school or med school but wasn’t accepted initially.  
    She returned to Sioux Falls where she was a volunteer firefighter and EMT. She eventually became a member of the crash fire and rescue team at the Air National Guard base in Sioux Falls.
    In 2003, she got accepted to P.A. school at USD where one of her classmates was Jody Spady of Enders. Ironically, Havel said she didn’t even know Spady was a P.A. in Chase County until she arrived here.
    Between 2005 and 2011,

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