Husband-and-wife cardiology team of Alton and Eaton retire from Mansfield Hospital

Gregory Eaton and Mary Alton are well-versed on the intricacies of the heart.

Some of it they learned during medical school, but the rest they discovered from each other.

The husband-and-wife duo retired together this summer after nearly 24 years as cardiologists at OhioHealth Mansfield Hospital .

"We were successful at kind of maintaining two lives, if you will, family life and a work life, although they do mix at bad times sometimes," Eaton said. "We have a lot of other interests that we can now build upon, like travelling, spending time with family, walking, exercising, and all the things that got a little bit neglected while we were busy with our professional lives."

'We graduated in the same class'

The doctors both grew up in the Buckeye State; Alton in Mansfield and Eaton in Columbus.

They attended medical school at The Ohio State University at the same time, but never met because of opposite schedules.

"We didn't know each other, but we graduated in the same class," Alton said.

They went to separate residency programs, then chose to return to OSU to study cardiology.

"When we did our cardiology fellowship, we met each other," Alton said. "We went on to become professors and clinical doctors at Ohio State for nine years, in which time we got married and had three kids."

'There are two kinds of ladders in life'

Their careers thrived at Ohio State, almost to the point of becoming too much.

Eaton had become director of cardiology, his schedule often filled by hours in the catheterization labs.

Alton was a clinical doctor who spent half her time traveling throughout Ohio to see patients.

They were not looking for new jobs, but suddenly a postcard appeared that advertised the need for both invasive and non-invasive cardiologists in Mansfield.

"There are two kinds of ladders in life, right?" Eaton said. "There's a personal-family ladder and a kind of business-job ladder, and we wanted to do both and we felt that climbing both ladders could be better done in a community like Mansfield where we could give back to our community and give back to our families without compromising one or the other."

'It's really been a pleasure and honor'

Not only did the move to North Central Ohio offer the doctors more family time, but it gave them an opportunity to improve heart care at Mansfield's hospital.

"When you're at a big institution like Ohio State, you kind of interact with the patient, but you don't really follow them because they go back to their own community," Eaton said. "We kind of missed that piece of practicing medicine. ... We felt that an opportunity in this area was to establish advanced heart care but also to follow patients over many, many years and see how they did because of how we interacted with them and how we could advance the care not just in interactions, but also in facility upgrades, investments in the hospital, teaching staff and putting protocols in place."

Working and living in Mansfield allowed the doctors to help thousands of new patients over the years while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

"We'd like to think our family was better and closer because of our decision to move," Eaton said. "And we'd like to think that healthcare and advanced heart care has been established and is flourishing and better from when we got here."

The doctors improved Mansfield's cardiac program in different ways.

"We're both cardiologists, but he is interventional," Alton said. "He has to take care of the closed arteries, the valves that don't work."

Those operations often come at inconvenient times, and are always urgent.

"The science is that when it's a blocked artery, when you open it up, that person will live longer and do much better than if you wait till the morning," Alton said. "Basically at 2 o’clock in the morning, he'd be getting phone calls to come into the hospital."

His operations have often relied upon his wife's prior work with any given patient.

"Dr. Alton has the thinking job," he said. "She does a lot of the stress testing, takes a lot of the pictures of the heart with ultrasounds and CT scan, and puts together the pieces of the puzzle of what the problem most likely is going to be, and then the interventional cardiologist kind of fixes what she has outlined."

They're happy they chose to move to Mansfield, and so are the thousands of patients they've helped over the years.

"It's really been a pleasure and honor to help with taking care of the Mansfield community," Alton said. "And we really enjoy just living here in Richland County. It's very comfortable, calm."

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This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Husband-and-wife cardiology team of Alton and Eaton retire from Mansfield Hospital