A glorious blend of forces came together to save Gordon Hendrickson’s life: smart doctoring, luck, kindness, and his own wisdom and abundant grit.

Only his insurance company tried to stand in the way.

Five years ago, when Mr. Hendrickson was 66, routine blood work found something amiss with his liver. One test led to another, and then to an awful diagnosis: pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest kinds.

His doctors thought he was among the lucky few with pancreatic cancer found early enough to be cured by surgery. But they warned him not to have the surgery in his home city, Albuquerque. They said the operation he needed, a Whipple procedure, was so risky and complicated that it should be done only by a surgeon who performed it often and at a hospital with many similar cases. But neither was available locally.

Albuquerque’s population was less than half a million, and the entire state of New Mexico had fewer than two million people, not enough to give local surgeons much practice with a relatively uncommon operation.