by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
NPR broadcast a show last week about a man who was brought to a Kentucky hospital in 2021 because of a drug overdose, was declared “brain dead”, and then ushered into the operating room to harvest his organs.
The problem was that he was not dead, and woke up on the operating table, where he began to cry and was “thrashing around”, horrified at what was happening.
Natasha Miller says she was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor into the operating room.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
She quickly realized something wasn’t right. Though the donor had been declared dead, he seemed to her very much alive.
“He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” Miller told NPR in an interview. “And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly.”
Donna Rhorer of Richmond, Kentucky, told NPR that her 36-year-old brother, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, was the patient involved in the case. He was rushed to the hospital because of a drug overdose, she says.
Rhorer was at the hospital that day. She says she became concerned something wasn’t right when TJ appeared to open his eyes and look around as he was being wheeled from intensive care to the operating room.
“It was like it was his way of letting us know, you know, ‘Hey, I’m still here,’ ” Rhorer told NPR in an interview.
But Rhorer says she and other family members were told what they saw was just a common reflex. (Source.)
But what happened next, is what is truly horrifying about this story.
While the doctors stopped immediately with the head surgeon stating “I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it”, the case coordinator at the hospital for Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA) called her supervisor for advice, where they allegedly told her to “find another doctor to do it. We’re going to do this case. You need to find someone else.”
The donor’s condition alarmed everyone in the operating room at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Ky., including the two doctors, who refused to participate in the organ retrieval, she says.
“The procuring surgeon, he was like, ‘I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it,’ ” Miller says. “It was very chaotic. Everyone was just very upset.”
Miller says she overheard the case coordinator at the hospital for her employer, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA), call her supervisor for advice.
“So the coordinator calls the supervisor at the time. And she was saying that he was telling her that she needed to ‘find another doctor to do it’ – that, ‘We were going to do this case. She needs to find someone else,’ ” Miller says. “And she’s like, ‘There is no one else.’ She’s crying — the coordinator — because she’s getting yelled at.” (Source.)
Some of the KODA employees quit over this incident, and some of them had to receive therapy over the trauma this incident caused them.
The organ retrieval was canceled. But some KODA workers say they later quit over the October 2021 incident, including another organ preservationist, Nyckoletta Martin.
“I’ve dedicated my entire life to organ donation and transplant. It’s very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen and there’s not more in place to protect donors,” says Martin.
Martin was not assigned to the operating room that day, but she says she thought she might get drafted. So she started to review case notes from earlier in the day. She became alarmed when she read that the donor showed signs of life when doctors tried to examine his heart, she says.
“The donor had woken up during his procedure that morning for a cardiac catheterization. And he was thrashing around on the table,” Martin says.
Cardiac catheterization is performed on potential organ donors to evaluate whether the heart is healthy enough to go to a person in need of a new heart.
Martin says doctors sedated the patient when he woke up and plans to recover his organs proceeded.
KODA officials downplayed the incident afterwards, according to Martin. She was dismayed at that, she says.
“That’s everybody’s worst nightmare, right? Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin says. “That’s horrifying.”
“Several of us that were employees needed to go to therapy. It took its toll on a lot of people, especially me,” Martin told NPR. (Source.)
All of this was revealed last month (September, 2024) by a letter Nyckoletta Martin wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which held a hearing investigating organ procurement organizations.
KODA stated that this was a mistake, and rarely happens, but others interviewed by NPR disagreed that this was “rare.”
Some critics of the organ procurement system say they weren’t entirely surprised by the allegations. With more than 103,000 people on the waiting list for a transplant, organ procurement organizations are under enormous pressure to increase the number of organs obtained to save more lives. In addition, there is an ongoing debate about how patients are declared dead.
“I hope that a case like this really is extreme, but it does reveal some of those underlying issues that can arise when there are disagreements about the determination of death,” says Dr. Matthew DeCamp, an associate professor of Medicine and bioethicist at the University of Colorado.
Read More @ HealthImpactNews.com
