‘HORRIFYING’

Witnesses Say Would-Be Organ Donor Started ‘Thrashing’ on the Table

Organ preservationists who saw an ostensibly dead patient come back to life said they were pressured to proceed with a harvest surgery.

Disaster was averted at a Kentucky hospital when an ostensibly deceased organ donor began “thrashing” around in the operating theater, a preservationist tells NPR.

“He was moving around,” Natasha Miller recalled of the patient, whom NPR identified as Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II. “He was crying visibly.”

The two surgeons assigned to the transplant naturally refused to go through with the procedure, which was reportedly scheduled to take place at Baptist Health Richmond Hospital in October 2021. But when her colleague called Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, which coordinated the harvest, Miller said the supervisor told them they “were going to do the case” and needed to “find another doctor.”

In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for the Network for Hope—an organization formed this year by a merger between KODA and the LifeCenter Organ Donor Network—said that “no one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient” and that “KODA does not recover organs from living patients.”

Baptist Health Richmond told NPR: “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.” The Daily Beast has contacted both entities for comment.

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Another former KODA employee, Nyckoletta Martin, told NPR that Hoover, who’d been believed brain dead, reanimated during a procedure to assess his heart health. “He was thrashing around on the table” at that point, too, Martin said, alleging that his physicians merely “sedated” him. Martin would eventually become the whistle-blower, submitting a letter to Congress for a hearing on organ donation organizations.

A coalition of 1,100 professionals and patients involved in transplant procedures nationwide countered in their own letter that “misinformation” has been “eroding public trust in organ donation” and discouraging people from signing up as donors. But nonetheless, several government agencies—the Kentucky attorney general and the U.S. Health Services and Resources Administration—are reportedly investigating.

While the KODA rep told NPR that the “case has not been accurately represented,” Martin described the incident as “everybody’s worst nightmare.”

“Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin told NPR. “That’s horrifying.”

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