Photo by Sally Brock Dr. Teresa Heavner cuts her retirement cake.
By Lorraine Bennett
Staff Writer
“I’ve never been one of those people to balance life and work,” Dr. Teresa Heavner said. “It’s always been work.”
Come December 31, she will try to change that. In medical practice in western North Carolina since Monday, Aug. 13, 1990 (she remembers the date exactly), Heavner will retire, leaving her office at Chatuge Family Practice to turn a new page and see what life offers next.
She lives in Brasstown and has no plans to move. She may take some local classes, she said. She has some travel plans — maybe New Zealand and Alaska. She has enlarged and screened her front porch.
Asked if she will be doing any medical consulting after retiring, she answered, “A guarded yes, to my patients. Will I be available at the hospital? No. I may be in and out of the office and available to my colleagues, but in the hospital? Far too many cooks in the kitchen.”
A native of Rockingham in the Piedmont part of the state, Heavner remembers looking over career books in her school library when she was trying to decide what to do with her life. Her mother was a nurse who did obstetrics work. She remembers her local family doctor, Phillip White.
Her father, a World War II veteran, used the GI bill to attend barber school. When the late 1960s came along, she remembers teens let their hair grow and her dad’s business dwindled. He went to work for Hanes Hosiery where the company had a program allowing employees’ children to apply for scholarships. She got one, to Wake Forest.
In college, she thought about a medical career.
“But I didn’t think I could do it. I thought about being a physician’s assistant. Then I did well on the Medical College Admission Test and I thought maybe I can do this after all.”
She earned her medical degree from Bowman Gray in 1987, later renamed Wake Forest University School of Medicine and now Atrium Wake Forest Baptist in Winston-Salem. She completed her residency in Bangor, Maine.
In medical school she heard about the loan for service program.
“If you went to an underserved area you paid back your loan with years of service,” she said. She looked at underserved regions in North Carolina – Hickory, Sparta near the Virginia border, Hot Springs and extreme western North Carolina. For four years of service her medical school loans would be repaid.
She came to work in the area as a tryout and never left. She practiced at a satellite office at Murphy Medical Center but most of her years have been spent in Hayesville. She estimates her patients currently number between 1,000 and 1,200 “not counting the number of babies I’ve delivered.”
Heaver said she always was interested in family medicine, in being “a jill of all trades. I never found anything that interested me more.” The best memories she will take with her from her decades of practice are “my very unique patients, the wonderful staff people, living in a vacation area, office parties that were always a hoot and interesting cases I really can’t talk about.”
Her worst memories will include how, “for financial reasons we had to close the Murphy office, my car window broken by a falling tree branch, two staff people who had their cars stolen from the parking lot in Murphy and the patients we lost to COVID — healthy one day and dead after the next two or three days.”
She also vividly remembers being snowed in at the hospital during the blizzard of 1993.
Some of her saddest days, she said, were when she had to tell patients they were suffering from dementia.
Chatuge Family Practice is a nonprofit operated by Clay Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. The Hayesville office has five doctors on board and one nurse practitioner.
At the end of the year, it will have one less doctor. Her last day to see scheduled patients will be Tuesday, Dec. 31. Then she will turn a new page and take a different look at life.
At a well-attended reception at the Beal Center Sunday, Oct. 20 fellow doctors, current and former coworkers, friends and patients came to honor her and her years of service.
They wanted to tell her, also, how much she will be missed.