An organ donor who was wrongly declared brain dead reportedly woke up on the operating table as surgeons in Kentucky prepared to check the condition of his heart to transplant it into another patient.
“It’s everyone’s worst nightmare, isn’t it? Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and remove parts of your body? It’s horrible,” lamented Nyckoletta Martin, a former organ conservator for the Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliation (KODA), in an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) on Thursday.
Several years after the October 2021 incident at Baptist Health Hospital in Richmond, Kentucky, accusations emerged in September against KODA that the organization pressured its employees into organ harvesting. .
Today, Anthony Thomas Hoover II, alias “TJ”, still struggles to walk and eat, in addition to suffering from memory problems, according to what his sister Donna Rhorer told the American radio channel.
That day, the 36-year-old patient was rushed to the hospital for a drug overdose, before being declared brain dead by the healthcare team, who were rushed to take him to the operating room to check if his heart was still viable.
Refusal to proceed
Except that the file would have caused commotion among the employees, while several, refusing to operate, were not convinced that they had before them a brain dead patient.
“He was moving, like he was struggling. When we got closer, you could see he had tears in his eyes. He was crying. The surgeon told me: “I’m going out. I don’t want anything to do with it.” It was very chaotic. Everyone was really upset,” Natasha Miller, who was in the operating room, told NPR.
But when organ donation coordinators contacted their supervisors to tell them the surgeons were refusing to proceed, they were then told to find new surgeons.
The patient would then be sedated to continue the process, before the team eventually ended the operation.
“Angry”
“I feel angry. I feel betrayed by the fact that people told us he was brain dead (…) They are trying to play God. They are almost choosing – taking (the life of) this person to (save) others. I lost a little faith in humanity,” the patient’s sister told NPR.
Especially since when he was wheeled into the operating room, his brother opened his eyes: a gesture explained to the family as a simple reflex common among the dead.
Following this incident, several KODA employees, including Nyckoletta Martin, reportedly resigned. The company has now reportedly merged with the LifeCenter Organ Donor Network to form the Network for Hope group.
“It scares me very much now that these things are allowed to happen and that there are not more measures in place to protect donors,” she denounced in an open letter submitted to the US Congress. in October.
For its part, the organization responsible for obtaining organs KODA indicated that the file had not been represented correctly, affirming that “never” its employees had “undergone pressure to remove organs from a living patient ”, according to the president and director of operations of Network for Hope, Julie Bergin.
This case has also reopened debates on how patients are declared dead, according to NPR.
