But inwardly, Mieczkowski was suffering from deep despair.
“I grew up in Steubenville and when people ask me, I always say I had a difficult childhood,” Mieczkowski said. “I can vividly recall my physical abusive, alcoholic father from a very young age.”
The youngest child in a Catholic family of seven children, Mieczkowski said both his parents were abusive. His sister Mary Ellen also suffered from abuse and older brother Bob took on the role of caregiver, shopping for food when there was none in the home.
Mieczkowski somehow moved on and went to Carnegie Melon University, graduating in 1978. He developed an interest in heart disease and began researching ways to prevent it.
“My oldest brother had heart disease that developed when he was in his early 40s,” Mieczkowski said. “And we have a history on my mother’s side of premature death.”
Mieczkowski joined the research center team at the University of Cincinnati in 1985, focusing specifically on how obesity is related to heart disease. He relocated to Wright State University School of Medicine in 1987, where he was a professor of internal medicine and the director of the computers in medicine program.
He came to Kettering Medical Center in 1990 and began seeing patients referred from cardiologists. Eventually he opened his own private practice in Kettering in 1997 — The Center for Cholesterol Treatment in Education.
“I was nominated to go to the National Institutes of Health to participate in cholesterol research,” Mieczkowski said.
Mieczkowski’s practice was one of the first that had a team approach — including a dietician and exercise physiologist — designed to help patients with heart disease prevent future events.
“The early years were tough, as with anything that is innovative,” Mieczkowski said. “Working through a private practice model made it even more difficult.”
Eventually the practice was so busy that Mieczkowski hired an assistant and had as much of as a three month long waiting list. He was married and had two children but eventually went through a difficult divorce. Then in 2008, he married his current wife, Joanne, who became his office manager.
“We were living in Kettering, and I had a catastrophic complication from a routine colonoscopy,” Mieczkowski said. “I ended up losing half of my blood after I hemorrhaged.”
Mieczkowski was admitted to the hospital but continued to lose blood. After long delays, a doctor finally discovered a nicked artery from the site where a large polyp had been removed during — the cause of the massive blood loss.
The side effects ended up being devastating to Mieczkowski, his life and his career.
“I tried to go back to work but lacked focus and concentration and I felt very weak,” he said. “I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs.”
After a few weeks, Mieczkowski saw a cardiologist who determined he had a form of heart failure called Preserved Ejection Fraction. By June of 2018, Mieczkowski knew he needed to retire.
“I was only 62 years old and had planned to work at least another five years or longer,” Mieczkowski said. “I loved what I was doing.”
After closing his practice in October 2018, Mieczkowski and his wife moved to Loveland, north of Cincinnati. Because of his health, Mieczkowski wanted to be closer to the UC Tri-Health system, where his cardiologist practiced.
“The first year or two afterward, I didn’t do much of anything because I felt so poorly,” Mieczkowski said.
Therapy helped him
In 2001, after decades of trying to forget his childhood trauma, Mieczkowski decided to start counseling. All four boys in his family have had various struggles with mental health.
“I had to open boxes I didn’t want to open,” Mieczkowski said. “I never would have imagined I’d be in counseling for eight years.”
Today, Mieczkowski is on the other side. His health has improved, and he has written a book about his childhood trauma — “Room on the Right — a memoir of Abuse, Trauma and Neglect,” which was published June 3 of this year.
“I had written over the years about what had happened to me as a child,” Mieczkowski said. “Writing it down made it easier to try to relate to it all.”
He ends the book by describing a visit to his dilapidated childhood home in Steubenville and then again once it was torn down.
“Six months afterward, grass and small trees had already started to grow on the empty lot,” Mieczkowski said. “It was always an evil place in my mind and seeing it gone was a type of emotional release.”
Never setting out to write the book as a story of survival, Mieczkowski said it turns out that it’s reaching people who can relate to living through trauma.
“I want to be remembered as someone who gave back to the community, professionally and personally,” Mieczkowski said. “I think I’ve done that. I’ve chosen to live my life fully as a way to eliminate pain and suffering of the past.”
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