After a week of testimony, the last witness took the stand Tuesday in the Paula Parker medical malpractice trial.

Mrs. Parker, a 1976 graduate of Hickory High School in Hermitage, died nine years ago in the hospital of Sharon Regional Health System of a blood clot in her lung, caused by complications from the Caesarean-section birth of her son three weeks earlier at Washington Hospital in Washington County.

Dr. Kevin D. Stocker, who performed Mrs. Parker's C-section, talked about his treatment of Mrs. Parker, who was 35.

Jurors learned that two of the six doctors named in the suit, including Stocker, were not certified by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists at the time they treated Mrs. Parker.

"I was considered board-eligible," Stocker said, adding that getting the certification was largely a technicality. After completing his four-year residency, Stocker said, he was required to gather a year's worth of cases and patients to present to the board. Only then, he said, was he permitted to sit for the intensive oral examination to gain certification.

Both Stocker and Dr. Malay Sheth, who testified last week, were board-eligible when they treated Mrs. Parker. Both had completed their residencies six months earlier at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh.

Stocker said he had no idea Mrs. Parker was at an increased risk of deep vein thrombosis, or the forming of blood clots in the veins.

Stocker said that when Mrs. Parker left the hospital she was moving around well "and was not at any increased risk of thrombosis, no more than anyone else."

When she died, he said, he and his business partners were greatly concerned. "I feel terrible," he said. "This is the only obstetrical death in my practice of 10 years. Me and my group feel terribly about it," he said, adding he thought the group had done nothing wrong in their treatment of Mrs. Parker.

Closing arguments will be heard today in Judge Michael Wherry's courtroom.

The case is being heard in Mercer County because Mrs. Parker died here and because Sharon Regional's Home Health Agency was originally named as a defendant.

Sharon Regional has since settled the wrongful-death complaint against it for $82,000.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Amanda Smith-Teutsch at: ateutsch@sharonherald.com