Harvested alive: Organ donor wakes up on the table

When T.J. Hoover was declared brain-dead after suffering an overdose in October 2021, the last thing his loved ones thought would happen, happened.

While on the operating table as an organ donor, Hoover was alive.

Donna Rhorer, Hoover’s sister, says doctors were attempting to harvest his organs while he was still showing signs of life — like his eyes being open and tracking movement during his honor walk, which is when family says goodbye before organ donation surgery.

“Almost immediately as soon as his honor walk started, his eyes were opened, and they were tracking, looking around at the people that were there,” Rhorer said.

Forty-five minutes after he was taken away, a doctor then informed her and the rest of the family that the procedure had been stopped.

“She said, ‘I stopped it. He’s not ready. He woke up,’” Rhorer said.

“He was admitted to Baptist Health’s emergency room. He was unresponsive for two days. His family then agreed to donate his organs, and that was his wish. So he was prepped for organ donation surgery,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey explains.

“But as they were prepping him, he began thrashing, crying, resisting, showing signs of life,” she continues.

The independent Health Resources and Services Administration review found clear negligence by the organ procurement organization, or OPO, that was involved in Hoover’s case.

But they didn’t stop at Hoover.

“HRSA examined 351 cases where organ donation was authorized but not completed, identifying issues. … Of those, 73 patients showed neurological signs incompatible with organ donation, and 28 may not have been deceased when procurement began,” Stuckey explains.

“That’s very scary,” Stuckey says. “Should we credit this to just incompetence and laziness, or is there something else going on?”

“The error here, I think, was that when you assess somebody, when you look at them in the bed and you get a sense of how severely they’ve been neurologically injured, you need to know, are you actually seeing their neurologic function?” Dr. Raymond Lynch, chief of the organ transplant branch at HRSA, tells Stuckey.

“Or is that being clouded either by the drugs that the hospital’s giving to keep them comfortable,” he continues, “or by some other thing like a drug overdose that led to them coming into the hospital in the first place?”

“In Mr. Hoover’s case … he was recovering, and it was being documented by OPO staff that he was recovering. He was waking up, but they didn’t change what they were planning to do, and it was a hospital physician who said, ‘I’m not comfortable proceeding with this,’ and ended the process,” he adds.

“So, I don’t know if you can answer this,” Stuckey says, “but why would they record that there were signs of recovery and decide to move forward anyway?”

“I think this is something that,” he answers, “you know, we find in government review of similar systems. … There was a lack of critical thinking to reassess what trained physicians and hospital staff were telling them, and it’s a circumstance where you can’t let this be a runaway train.”

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