Case of Anthony Thomas ‘TJ’ Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials
A man who had gone into cardiac arrest and been declared brain dead woke up as surgeons in his home state of Kentucky were in the middle of harvesting his organs for donation, his family has told media outlets.
As reported Thursday by both National Public Radio and the Kentucky news station WKYT, the case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. Officials within the US’s organ-procurement system insist there are safeguards in place to prevent such episodes, though his family told the outlets their experience highlights a need for at least some reform.
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WKYT reported that Rhorer only learned the full details of her brother’s surgery at the hands of Baptist and the Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (Koda) in January. That’s when a former employee of Koda contacted her before sending a letter to a congressional committee that in September held a hearing scrutinizing organ-procurement organizations, NPR reported.
The letter’s author said she saw Hoover begin “thrashing” around on the operating table as well as start “crying visibly”, according to NPR.
Just to be clear, they had not actually started harvesting anything.
The nurses and doctors noticed as he was wheeled into the operating room and called it off, a bunch of them ended up in therapy over the situation.
Someone fucked up by declaring him brain dead clearly. He does however have significant brain damage from the drug overdose that initiated the whole situation.
This article says he was considered brain dead for three years. Where are you getting your extra info from?
This is scary either way.
She was caring for him for three years.
You cannot be brain dead for three years. Brain death is legal death. Once you are declared brain dead, you are officially a cadaver and won’t be going home. You are going to the morgue that day, with possibly a brief initial stop in the operating room if you’re an organ donor.
That’s not the case (at least in Germany). Being brain dead does not replace the conscious decision on when to disable life support.
That’s not correct. When a person is declared dead but is maintained for organ harvesting, a tech is brought in to keep the body stable to best preserve all organs being taken. Think ICU, but focused on saving the organs with not much concern for the brain. Breathing, BP, and heart rate are optimized for organ survival until a surgical team can be set up for harvesting. A colleague did it for a while, and said it was depressing and a lot of sitting around watching the monitor and tweaking drips until they could arrange surgery. When my brother died, we donated what we could, but a lot of his organs were non-viable due to his illness… still, every little bit helps.
I’d like to lighten up the mood by commenting the guy is lucky this happened in Kentucky… everyone knows the standard for being brain dead is much lower there. :)
If you think google his name you can see a picture of him riding in a car with his sister in 2023 so he’s clearly not braindead.
We all know those drivers
Seems like they must have fucked up multiple times. I’m thinking it was probably the nurses that blew the whistle on this and stopped the whole thing.
The articles about this specify that it was the doctors that refused to perform the operation.
“Were in the middle of harvesting his organs…” He’d be dead by that point.
They can probably remove the corneas before incisions are made for the major organs, but once they make that first incision, those organs come out in a matter of minutes to be placed in sterile containers.
“Had gone into cardiac arrest” meaning his heart stopped. From a drug overdose. Anyone here wanna guess what that means? You got it - CPR. Anyone who knows how to actually do CPR knows that if you do it correctly you are breaking ribs. That’s going to hurt like fuck when you wake back up.
When they harvest organs, they aren’t just specialized butchers in there. These are surgeons, specifically specializing in organ transplant. The room for error in this specialty is 0. Every modern surgery, regardless of it is organ harvesting or not, will ultimately have a “pause” where everyone goes down the list to make sure everything that needs to be checked is checked.
He likely didn’t get to the pause, he probably woke up before that. He was probably being evaluated by the team, and one individual caught something that had been overlooked. The rest of the team spent time to verify, then determined they could actually revive him. This is not a pleasant experience. He would not have been given pain medication beforehand, as he was in for a drug overdose, I could predict it probably wouldn’t work anyway.
Whoever went public with this will cause many deaths because of the increase in fear of organ donation.
It depends on how you define, “in the middle”. According to NPR he had woken up during his heart catheter to check it’s health for donation and they just sedated him back down. It was when he went into the final operating room that they refused to do the organ removal. That’s past all the checks that are supposed to be done. If he wasn’t visibly writhing on the table and crying he’d be dead.
Your mixing organ procurement after cardiac death with brain death. It’s the cardiac death donations where they have to move very fast to reduce the warm ischemia time.
For brain death they can be systematic, corneas sure, but for major organs usually kidneys first, bowel, liver, pancreas if usable (usually with bickering about which team gets more vena cava and aorta). Heart and lungs are functioning throughout the abdominal portion to keep them well perfused, then each is flushed and chilled as it’s passed off. So there is a period of time of ongoing surgery for this to occur.
But you’re right, the process to declare brain death is lengthy and very formalized. Then while someone from anesthesia is in the room to maintain the body, they are not giving anesthesia. And definitely right about the last point, but it’s a big fuck up.
“…cases like Hoovers are one-offs…”
Ummm, CASES LIKE THIS??? THERE’S MORE???
The letter’s author said she saw Hoover begin “thrashing” around on the operating table as well as start “crying visibly”, according to NPR.
Fucking horror show.
There was a case Texas a few years back where the Dad of the kid took his gun to the hospital because they were going to pull the plug and harvest his organs. He thought that his kid wasn’t brain dead.
They were wondering what they would do with this nut job when the kid started moving.
He wasn’t brain dead and the Dad was right.
Wow, what a story 😬 I wonder how many of these there are? Of course they want to keep them out of the public, but damn. Even one is too much.
Really want to know exactly who declared brain death? For instance in the article the family talks about seeing eye movements and being told they’re "just reflexes."Yeah that may be, but reflexes involving the eyes are cranial nerve reflexes, they go through the brain. There can’t be brain death if they are there. That’s a brain function. Testing to make sure all cranial nerve reflexes are absent (gag, apnea, vestibular, etc) is one of the basic pieces of brain death testing.
There’s a lot of confusion in popular media between brain death and persistent vegetative state. In a persistent vegetative state there’s still many brain functions going, but troubles maintaining consciousness. Brain death testing when properly done there is extensive testing done by a neurologist or someone with a similar background to show no brain function at all remains before it can be declared brain death, no matter how basic, even the simplest of brain reflexes. It’s not just one test but a whole series of testing with different modalities.
Would really like to know what happened here to cause such a colossal mess. Or nearly did, the doctors stopped before doing anything at least.
I suspect that when they declared him brain dead, it was too early in recovering from the overdose that his reflexes weren’t normal yet.
Drug interactions and drug metabolism are complete unknowns, as I strongly suspect this guy did not have genomic testing done before they administered narcan or whatever antidotes they needed to push.
This isn’t something that gets done like after a few hours or a day or something. It takes quite some time to get through cooling protocols, warming again, complete all the testing, geting everything stable. Talking like a week plus at the quickest. And cranial nerve reflexes are just one thing of many different tests done. And to boot, it sounds like from the article they knew he had cranial nerve reflexes, which anyone halfway competent should know, means there is certainly not brain death. Really want to know what this hospital was doing that they messed up so badly.
So uh…did he die??
Nope. The npr article has a picture of him dancing with his sister at her wedding three years after the incident.
Oh that is a relief
Well, don’t get too comfy. It’s still a wild ride, and it appears it is more frequent than you may imagine.
I often think everyone should be an organ donor by default and have to opt out rather than opt in, but Jesus, stories like this make me reconsider.
We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”
Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says.
interesting
