Bill Schatzman, the Forsyth County sheriff, is known for his confidence. But his wife's death last month at the age of 62 shook him to the core.
"You just feel so darn helpless, old and inadequate and all of those things," said Schatzman, who is 64.
What bothers Schatzman is that his wife died of a heart condition, dilated cardiomyopathy, that had not been diagnosed. Had it been diagnosed, Jane Micol Schatzman might have lived for years to come — with the right medicine and therapy.
Now the sheriff struggles with that knowledge and with memories of his wife. They met in Winston-Salem in 1983. He was an FBI agent who'd grown up in Connecticut, and she was a flight attendant who'd grown up in Valdese. Both were parents who had been married before. They hit it off from the start, and were married in 1985.
Jane Schatzman, witty, elegant and a great cook, was no shrinking violet.
After Bill Schatzman first won election as sheriff in 2002, his wife would occasionally tell him to cool down his political rhetoric. "I don't care how you did it up North, that's not going to work down here," she would tell him, according to Schatzman. "She was always on me about being a Yankee and being impatient," he said.
She managed their finances and ran their house, he said. On the day she died, she'd been working on a renovation project at their house. The sheriff came home and found her on the floor. She'd apparently been going through a pile of paperwork concerning the project, he said, and "She just kind of slipped over on her right side, like she had just kind of decided to take a nap."
He called 911 and performed CPR in vain. His wife was already gone.
She'd been fine in the days before her death, Sheriff Schatzman said. They'd even talked about "a 20-year-plan" because "we thought at least we'd make it into our early 80s," he said.
Eleven years ago, he said, his wife had a heart problem called mitral valve prolapse, but that problem had cleared up. That problem was apparently unrelated to the dilated cardiomyopathy, in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged. Dilated cardiomyopathy can be hard to detect.
Jane Schatzman went for regular checkups, Bill Schatzman said. And "the irony of ironies is that she did have literature in her pocketbook that indicated there was an opportunity for her to have a cardio-exam on the 11th of June, a public screening," he said.
He thinks a lot about that these days. He also thinks about "realigning priorities."
"You want to smell the flowers more," Schatzman said. "You want to live in terms of being around people that you want to love. You want to change what's happening. You want to go out and make a difference."
For Schatzman, making a difference has meant telling women to get screening for heart problems. Heart disease, once most closely associated with men, now kills more women than ever before, he said.
Perhaps the criteria for deciding when heart screening is needed should be more stringent, he said. In retrospect, he realizes that his wife's sleeplessness and her high blood pressure in the days before her death may have been a sign that she needed a screening — as was her previous heart problem.
Vinay Thohan, the medical director of the heart failure and transplant program at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said that "I always think there should be more screening … but screening should be dictated by a patient's risk factors and symptoms."
Schatzman is quick to say that he's sure not alone in struggling with the death of a spouse. But when you wonder if your loved one might have had a few more years of life if preventive steps had been taken, it's all the harder — especially in a county known for its medical advances.
"It just seems like in the 21st century, we ought to be able to do something about this," Schatzman said.
You can't help but feel that he's right.
John Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at jrailey@wsjournal.com.
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