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After 41 years, Dr. Ed Hazlehurst retires
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| Quail hunting with his English pointers, Jack and Kate, is Dr. Ed Hazlehurst’s favorite hobby. Now that he is retired, he plans to hunt more, and spend more time traveling with his wife and being around his grandchildren. |
Most of his trips to Jackson-Madison County General Hospital’s emergency room were made in the early years of his career as a general surgeon after he opened his practice in Jackson in 1965.
In fact, he says, building his clinic on Skyline Drive behind the hospital more than paid for itself with the time he saved in his frequent trips to the hospital. In practice by himself, Dr. Hazlehurst was responsible for most of his own emergency calls unless he was out of town. In the early years of his Jackson practice, physicians under 55 years of age who were on staff at the hospital rotated handling emergency room backup for a week at a time.
After years of being tied to his practice and on call much of the time, Dr. Hazlehurst has retired. He’s looking forward, he says, to hunting, spending time with grandchildren, and traveling with his wife, Aud.
He opened his practice in Jackson 41 years ago. When he built his clinic on Skyline Drive in 1971, he was the first doctor, he says, to have an office on Skyline. The street ended next to his clinic; it didn’t go all of the way through to Highland.
Coming to Jackson to set up practice was a good decision, he says. After medical school and a general surgery residency, he first spent two years in the U.S. Army where he worked for 17 months in a MASH unit in Korea about 15 miles south of the demilitarized zone. “I am proud of that,” he says. He then spent two years tending to patients in the coal mine area of Welch, West Virginia.
He saw a lot of trauma in Korea, he says, but he saw more trauma and treated more injuries in the first 20 years of his practice in Jackson.
In a way, Dr. Hazlehurst has had two different medical practices. The first half was as a general surgeon, treating trauma and doing general surgery. Then, in 1983, he was attending a weeklong review course when the instructor suggested that general surgeons learn gastrointestinal endoscopy, using less invasive instruments to treat problems of the colon and GI tract. Dr. Hazlehurst looked into it, traveled to learn from the experts in this emerging field, and gradually changed his practice to GI endoscopy. In the latter years, nearly all of his practice was GI endoscopy.
Now, he says, it’s time to retire. “After 41 years, after I made up my mind to retire, I’m looking forward to doing something else.”
He spent the last months of 2005 closing down his practice. He and his staff contacted patients he had seen in the last three years so they could pick up their medical records or have them referred to another physician. He’s selling his clinic building to the hospital.
It’s time to enjoy retirement. At the top of his list is quail hunting. “I’ve enjoyed it since I was a teen-ager,” he says. He owns three English pointers and hunts on land owned by him, his friends and his patients. Hunting season lasts from mid-November to the end of February.
He and Aud look forward to traveling. A recent cruise through the intercoastal waterways of Russia was “just magnificent,” he says. He and his wife have been married 41 years. A native of Norway, she was working for a Norwegian steamship company in New York City when he met her. They have four children and five grandchildren.
“I am blessed with good health,” he says. “I’m looking forward to this next phase in my life.”