“The organ donor is moving around! Sedate him!”
In 2021, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, was was rushed to the hospital after a drug overdose, determined to be dead, and was prepped for organ harvesting. His sister “became concerned something wasn’t right” when her brother appeared to open his eyes and look around as he was being wheeled from intensive care to the operating room. Oh, don’t worry, she and other family members were told. This was just a normal reflex! Nothing to see here, move along…
Natasha Miller, whose job at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Kentucky is to preserve donated organs for transplantation, also realized “something wasn’t right” when the supposedly dead organ donor began ” like, moving, thrashing around on the bed.”
“You could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly,” she told reporters. Two surgeons refused to participate in the organ retrieval, so the case coordinator for Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA), called her supervisor, who ordered her to find another surgeon to remove the organs. Thankfully the organ retrieval was canceled, but the incident horrified many involved. Miller told NPR, ” It’s very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen and there’s not more in place to protect donors.”
Gee, ya think?
Miller read in the case report that Hoover had showed signs of life during his cardiac catheterization, which is performed on (dead) potential organ donors to evaluate whether their hearts are healthy enough to be used in a heart transplant. The surgeons responded by sedating Hoover when he woke up and proceeded with plans to harvest his organs. After the organ harvest on the live patient had been cancelled, Miller raised the incident with KODA officials. They tried to minimize its significance.
The organization still denies what has been reported. Baptist Health Richmond also issued a statement saying, “The safety of our patients is always our highest priority. We work closely with our patients and their families to ensure our patients’ wishes for organ donation are followed.”
Of course they said that. The alternate statement, “Sometimes we mess up and harvest organs from a live patient” was deemed inappropriate.
State and national authorities are investigating the incident. Good. I found the statement Dorrie Dils, president of the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, made to NPR mordantly amusing:
“Incidents like this are alarming. And we would want them to be properly reported and evaluated. And obviously we want to ensure that individuals are, in fact, dead when organ donation is proceeding. And we want the public to trust that that is indeed happening. The process is sacred.”
Yeeeeah.
Sure.
Ethics Alarms 
Even “non-profit” hospitals have been turned into huge cash cows for the “hospital administrators” whose salaries are astronomical. Investment bankers and M&A lawyers have been feasting on the consolidation of the hospital industry. Even physicians are making a bundle selling their practices to corporate entities. The days of hospitals being run by churches, orders of nuns, or groups of physicians are long, long gone. Another Baby Boomer engineered catastrophe.
Who the hell decides to take organs from a person who has FAMILY standing in the hallway of the hospital?
I don’t understand this case at all. An acquaintance is a nurse who works in the field. She’s the one who flies on the plane with the cooler. She’s told us all kinds of stories. They start out the same way: patient is brain dead, rolled in to the OR, removed from life support, they wait for the patient to die (and there’s a time limit), THEN the harvesting begins. She did tell us of one case where not only did the patient not die but they wheeled her back to her room, and she went home a few days later.
What gets me is that this is donation. The family of the donor gets nothing. Everyone else? Big bucks. Huge.
“What gets me is that this is donation. The family of the donor gets nothing. Everyone else? Big bucks. Huge.”
Thanks for that, Alicia, I was wondering how to Follow The Money…it’s still unclear who-n-how-much; to me it is, leastways.
PWS
If families got a cut, then they’d have an incentive to…rush the procedure.
And this is one of the reasons I won’t be an organ donor.
Just think of how many people will refuse to be organ donors now. They will, of course, blame it on ‘misinformation’.