First off, let me say I am very sorry for your loss.All the following assumes you live in the US:I believe the specifics varies by state/county, but any unexpected death (with or without surgery) is by default a coroner's case. This means, someone at the hospital (doctor or nurse) is legally obligated to call the county coroner and report the death. The coroner has the discretion to order an autopsy, i.e. say yes or no they believe one should be done. In this situation, I would think they definitely would, and the body would be transferred to the coroner's office to do it. Even if the coroner says no, they don't require one, the attending doc of the patient can request an autopsy (to be done by the hospital.)I guess in your shoes I would do the following:Contact the surgeon and ask if the case was reported to the coroner. If not, why not. If they did call, what did they say about an autopsy.Then ask how you go about arranging a private autopsy. The surgeon might not know, but should be able to get you in contact with people in the hospital who can help you find out.Any respectable surgeon would want to know what happened just as much as you do. If you find him being evasive on the subject or refusing to return your calls, contact the hospital administration. Admins know medical legal risk and this is absolutely a red flag in that regard.
I'm not sure what details are most important here, so I'll try to sum things up clearly. I need to determine if I should pay for a private autopsy, the problem is money is tight. However, if it's likely someone messed up, I want to take action. This hospital has something of a reputation when it comes to problems with infections, and previously they messed up on a friend of mine, their mistake nearly led to the amputation of her arm. Luckily that time they caught their mistake, and the $250,000 medical bill wasn't placed on my friend.Male665'10"215 lbhad been on 5mg oxycontin for a bruised rib, took something like 30mg total a dayRough timeline:Day 1 he went to the ER for an infected toe. They referred him to another ER because the infection had spread to the bone and they needed to amputate. His GP said he had no diabetes. He may have had a case of bronchitis.Day 2 he's dealing with bad conditions at the hospital where his surgery will take place due to overcrowding in the non-covid section of the hospital while they give him antibiotics prior to surgery.Day 3 surgery takes place, surgeon reports everything went quickly and smoothly. Dad texts me after, saying everything went well. I talked with him and he sounded tired, but didn't seem out of the ordinary post-op.~14 hours later, a nurse says he was talking with my dad, he was joking with the nurse and the nurse "got his pain level down" and continued his rounds. An hour after this, my dad starts to gasp for breath, starts coding and they move him to the cardiology section where he passed.Some possible weirdness:The surgeon led me to believe there would be an autopsy, though he never directly stated there would be one, as he said my dad was relatively young and the surgeon didn't know what could have gone wrong. However, the surgeon had either already signed off on no-autopsy or did shortly thereafter. Going back to our conversation, the surgeon never said "there will be an autopsy" he just said "the coroner will have to tell us what happened" or something along those lines.I waited for a couple of days to hear back the results, but the hospital then lost my dad and the stuff he had brought in with him, they lost him for something like 4 or 5 days, with us calling every day after the 2nd day after his passing trying to find him and his phone so we could get his contacts and notify people. We still don't have his phone, so we haven't been able to notify all of his friends as the majority of their contact info is in his phone and we don't have it yet.