KQED: Death prompts family's questions about risky surgery

This story originally aired on KQED Public Radio.

When it comes to health care, where you live matters. Not just for getting in to see a doctor but for what your odds are of having surgery. And if your chances for surgery are higher, that means your risk of having complications with the procedure are also higher.

Chuck Magner says the thing he misses most about his dad is all the projects he’d have going at once in his shop or around his yard.

He said his dad, Jerry Magner, was always in his backyard at his house in a quiet town near Clearlake, about two hours north of San Francisco. His father, 79, had some ongoing health issues. But Chuck Magner said you wouldn’t know it because he was usually outside digging trenches or building a deck.

But in July Jerry Magner did have some health problems. Chuck Magner says it all went so fast. He was out of town on business when his dad ended up at St. Helena Hospital, part of a chain of non-profit Adventist Health facilities. He reported having a blackout when he was driving.

"I got a call on the phone that he was going to go through some extensive testing and he might have surgery,” he said. “My dad was used to saying he might have surgery a lot of times.” 

That’s because Jerry Magner had a history of vascular disease. He’d had at least two surgeries, called a carotid endarterectomy, at a different hospital. The artery in his neck was opened to remove plaque build up before it blocked blood supply to the brain and caused a stroke.

This time the artery on the other side of Jerry Magner’s neck was nearly three-quarters blocked. So a surgeon at St. Helena Hospital recommended the procedure again. Chuck Magner was taking this all in as he was about to board a plane back home. He says he tried to stop his dad and convince him to wait until he got back. 

“The last thing my father said to me was ‘don’t worry I got it all taken care of,” Magner said.

By the time Chuck Magner landed his dad’s surgery was over.  And, something had gone wrong. He went to St. Helena hospital to find his dad was unresponsive.

It turns out Jerry Magner had a stroke from the very surgery that was meant to prevent that stroke from happening. He died two weeks later. 

Stroke and death are actually known complications from this procedure – sometimes opening the artery can dislodge the plaque into the brain.

Dr. Dennis Baker, a professor of surgery at UCLA, says you have to carefully weigh if the procedure should be done, saying “there is always an alternative, you can always not operate.”

He says for the right patient, about 95 percent of the time there are no complications. But for the other roughly 5 percent, he said the stakes can be high – heart attack, stroke or death.

Instead of surgery Baker says some patients have other options.  They can take medications or get a stent to open the artery. And with these alternatives available Baker says fewer carotid endarterectomies are being done around California and the nation.

But that’s not the case at St. Helena Hospital, where Jerry Magner had his operation.