Dr. George Cook (Photo provided)

Dr. George Cook has been a doctor and friend to the North Country for 45 years, and on Tuesday, June 29, he will retire from Adirondack Health for a second time.

“It’s been wonderful for me,” Cook said. “I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to live in Saranac Lake.”

He came to Saranac Lake in November 1975 through a tip from Dr. Roy Slaunwhite.

“He said, ‘Look at Saranac Lake on the map. They could use another pediatrician.’ So, I got in my car two days later on a Saturday night around midnight in Buffalo, drove here, saw the lake, saw the hospital, saw the mountains, walked into the emergency room and said, ‘Howdy, folks, I’m your new pediatrician.’ That was quite a surprise, of course.”

Twenty minutes later, around 6:30 a.m., the CEO Jack Murphy came in and after talking for two hours, Cook, in fact, became the new pediatrician along with Slaunwhite.

Within a year, Cook, Slaunwhite and Dr. Barry Kilbourne were all working in the basement of what is now dentist John Murray’s office, with three small examination rooms.

The doctors came in to serve an important role to do outreach in the surrounding areas, including starting the health center still run by Adirondack Health in St. Regis Falls in 1976.

“We were seeing at least 100 patients a week up there between the four of us,” he said.

He said he and Slaunwhite became the doctors for Paul Smith’s College, the high schools in St. Regis Falls and Saranac Lake, and the state prison in Ray Brook.

“It was all because the people who were in private practice at the time weren’t heading out of town,” he said. “The outreach we were hired to do out of the area was extremely successful in the northern tier.”

In the decades that followed, Cook, Slaunwhite and Kilbourne shared a successful practice in the Physician’s and Surgeon’s building on the Adirondack Medical Center campus, where they treated thousands of patients and generations of families.

“I have one family where I have been involved in the care of six generations,” he said. “Once you’re one or two generations into looking after people, the family develops a comfort and trust with you.”

He said working for Adirondack Health allowed him to mold his work based on his personal life needs at the time. He said he was able to develop a formula for being a family practitioner and pediatrician that really worked for him.

“I knew I could never leave Saranac Lake, and I would never want to leave any of the relationships that I had worked to establish with my patients,” he said. “My mantra has always been, ‘Let me in those rooms because that’s where the people are.’ I was so enthralled by what it meant to get to know people.”

In the early years at the age of 31, Cook started paying special attention to patients who were additives of 10 from his age … 41, 51, 61, 71, etc. He said asking them a little bit extra about how they were doing helped educate him for things like end-of-life planning. He said he recommends this small technique to anyone in the medical profession.

“I spent extra special time talking with them about the trajectory of their life, which helped me tremendously to understand and accept the trajectory of my life,” he said. “I did it for them, but I also did it for me. I learned so much, and I was in a special place to do that because I was taking care of people from all walks of life.”

When Slaunwhite retired in 2013, Cook also retired — for three days. He then came back to work one day a week on Tuesdays at the Tupper Lake Health Center.

“Between 2013 and 2021, I established a whole new practice,” he said. “I didn’t think it was fair to continue on in pediatric care, because I knew I was at such a stage in my life that I wasn’t going to be able to follow these kids into their teens. Probably half of my practice was brand-new patients from 2013 on. It was another reinvention.”

One of his most memorable moments as a physician, and there are many, was around 1977 when a 2-year-old boy was found submerged near the Lake Colby Conservation Camp. He had been underwater for at least 30 minutes. He was rushed to the hospital by car and needed a tracheotomy, so Cook was called in from home.

“He had pulmonary edema, seizures, coma, aspiration pneumonia but we couldn’t transport him anywhere,” Cook said. “I took on this kid as my project and helped him to survive. I was at his bedside almost every day for two weeks — even in the middle of the night — until he could be transported to Burlington.”

In later years, Cook said the boy went on to graduate from Paul Smith’s College. One day, he stopped in to see Cook and thank him.

“It was just absolutely amazing to see this kid,” he said, adding that the man went on to get married and have children. “The whole thing came full circle for me, and it was just wonderful.”

Cook said his own family has benefited a lot from living in this area, including his four children.

“Five out of six of us are in the medical profession,” he said. “The whole family ended up in medicine and with no encouragement from me. I was glad for them, but I didn’t push them.”

His family will be a huge part of his retirement.

“I have a wonderful family,” he said. “I have kids that are 17 time zones away.”

His daughter Jessica lives in Thailand and his daughter Annelies (a 2014 Olympic biathlete) in Germany. His daughter Marlena is a medical student at University of Vermont, and his son Matt is a physician assistant with Northern Nephrology in Plattsburgh.

“I’m pretty involved in travel to visit family,” he said. “I’ve never stopped traveling.”

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Brittany Proulx is the internal communications coordinator for Adirondack Health and a former Enterprise news editor. Cook was her doctor from when she was a baby into her 20s.