Out of family's surgical tragedy, a lesson in health care

This article was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jerry and Cherry Magner were married for 60 years before he died from surgery complications in August. (Brant Ward/The Chronicle)

Jerry Magner tried to reassure his son Chuck that he had been through all of this before and just wanted to get back home to his wife of 60 years, who was recently diagnosed with dementia.

Magner was headed into surgery last summer to clean out a clogged artery in his neck, a procedure he had at least twice before.

“Don’t worry, I got it all taken care of,” Chuck Magner, of Concord, recalled his father telling him in a phone call.

Those were the last words the two ever shared.

On July 20, Magner, 79, underwent a procedure called carotid endarterectomy that is intended to prevent stroke. But the procedure triggered a stroke instead. Magner died almost two weeks later.

In the months since, Chuck, 55, has delved into the circumstances surrounding his father’s surgery, and isn’t convinced it should have happened so fast, if at all.

“As I pore over the details, nothing’s right,” he said. “I can’t walk away feeling comforted that what was done was the right thing.”

Magner’s story provides a glimpse into the critical information that patients and their families should know about treatment options and hospitals’ track records, but also the stiff challenges they face in finding it.

It also shows that geography matters in medicine, and that where you live can help determine how likely you are to go under the knife.

Jerry Magner welded nails into crosses and handed them out to friends and neighbors. (Brant Ward/The Chronicle)

Chuck Magner was stunned to learn that his father hailed from a rural area of Northern California whose residents have undergone this risky procedure at the second-highest rate in the state.

Residents of the Clearlake area are two-and-a-half-times more likely to undergo the surgery than average Californians, according to an analysis of statewide hospital data by Stanford Professor Laurence Baker. Only in Santa Maria do residents have a higher rate.