Man who was declared brain dead, woke up before organ retrieval.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

TJ Hoover on left.

Rob Stein reported for NPR on October 17 that TJ Hoover was declared brain dead but woke up before his organs were retrieved. Stein reported:

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.

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.”

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.”

The brain death declaration and organ donation incident happened in October 2021 resulted in some of the organ donation workers quitting their job.

The family was told that his movement was just a common reflex. Stein reported:

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. TJ Hoover now lives with Rhorer, and she serves as his legal guardian.

The US Uniform Law Commission have debated changing the organ donation dead donor rule to not require a person to be brain dead, but rather that the person have an irreversible medical condition for organ donation.

Organ donation researchers claim that people have not been declared brain dead, who were not brain dead, nonetheless, I have reported on several cases on this blog over the past few years of similar cases.

More articles on this topic:

• No to killing for organs (Link).
• Organ donation procedure violates the Dead Donor Rule (Link).
• Proposed changes to the UDDA will cause more litigation (Link). 
• Are people who are declared brain dead always dead? (Link).