By Staff
Recalls career serving eastern North Carolina
By DAN PARSONS, Staff Writer
After more than 40 years of practicing medicine, Dr. Zack Waters still says “it’s better to be lucky than to be skillful.”
Waters said he considers himself lucky to have used his skill in caring for area residents for so long and to have remained a family doctor, something he says is a dying breed. Even through coping with an infected heart valve and subsequent open-heart surgery, Waters has refused to sell his private surgical practice in Washington.
But Waters’ career, the majority of which has been spent serving the residents of Beaufort and surrounding counties, is coming to an end. Though Waters hadn’t planned to close his surgical practice until July 2009, heart disease is forcing him to retire at the end of this month.
Waters graduated from medical school in 1961. When he came out of school, he sailed straight into the Navy, which put his newly refined skills to work in Qauntico, Va., operating on wounded soldiers returning from Vietnam. He also pulled a stint in Iceland while in the Navy.
When he was discharged from the Navy, he and his wife, Debbie, headed for New Bern where he took a job as a vascular and general surgeon.
In 1979, when the couple arrived in Washington, the hospital had no dedicated emergency-room doctors.
Dr. Waters said the people he treats have been the most important element of his career as a healer. Small town medicine is most rewarding because it has given him the opportunity to build a loyal base of patients that know him personally and trust his skill and knowledge. He also credits the cadre of “honey lambs” that have backed him up at Beaufort County Hospital.
It isn’t only Dr. Waters’ colleagues that will miss him. Patients still drive from as far as Raleigh to see him specifically, he said. Mrs. Waters said she rarely ventures out of the house when a patient of his does not “come up to me and say how much they love my husband.”
Dr. Watson said being available to his patients was a responsibility of being their doctor and that he didn’t want other physicians treating his patients if he could help it.
If Dr. Waters had anything to say about it, his patients would still have him to care for them. It wasn’t his intention to retire yet, he said.
When asked what he plans to do in retirement, Waters’ wife quickly answered for him.
Leaving behind a life of hard work, Waters had a different vision for his future.
Dr. Waters plans to close his Washington office by the end of December. He asks that all of his former patients come by to pick up their medical records as soon as possible.