Hospital employee Natasha Miller told NPR that she was about to do her routine duty of preserving donated organs for transplantation when she noticed upon his being wheeled into the operating room by nurses that Hoover was still alive despite having been declared "braindead."
Miller and several of the doctors, recognizing that something was not right, refused to proceed in harvesting Hoover's organs. Hoover was awake, looking around with eyes open and "thrashing," when Miller and several doctors noticed his alertness.
"He was moving around – kind of thrashing," Miller said. "Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed. And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly."
Check out the video below showing Hoover during his recovery:
Man comes 'back to life' as surgeons began the process of harvesting his body parts after they determined he was de*d
Kentucky man TJ Hoover II was thrashing on the table & "crying visibly" as doctors prepared to remove his organs.
Before the process, the family raised concerns… pic.twitter.com/RRirSjDeD7
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 18, 2024
(Related: In case you missed it, check out our earlier report featuring testimony from Dr. Heidi Klessig, MD, about how doctors all across the country are harvesting organs from patients while they are still alive.)
Baptist Health tried to sedate Hoover and proceed with live organ extraction anyway
Even after it became undeniably clear that Hoover was still alive and aware, hospital officials decided to sedate him and try to proceed with the organ extraction. The transplant was ultimately canceled, though, as several employees, disgusted by the order to continue with the organ extraction anyway, quit in protest.
"The procuring surgeon, he was like, 'I'm out of it. I don't want to have anything to do with it,'" Miller further explained about what transpired. "It was very chaotic. Everyone was just upset."
Miller recalled overhearing the case coordinator at her employer, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA), call her supervisor for advice about what to do.
"So the coordinator calls the supervisor at the time. And she was saying that he was telling her that she needed to 'find another doctor to do it' – that, 'We were going to do this case. She needs to find someone else.' And she's like, 'There is no one else.' She's crying – the coordinator – because she's getting yelled at."
Another organ preservationist named Nyckoletta Martin commented that it shocked her to hear that someone who was clearly still alive was almost put under the knife for his organs. Thankfully for Hoover's sake his operation was canceled at the last minute, but how many others like him suffered a much different fate?
"I've dedicated my entire life to organ donation and transplant," Marin said. "It's very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen and there's not more in place to protect donors."
"The donor had woken up during his procedure that morning for a cardiac catheterization, and he was thrashing around on the table."
The Kentucky Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are both looking into the case to see what went wrong.
"I feel betrayed by the fact that the people that were telling us he was braindead, and then he wakes up," Hoover's sister said to NPR.
"This is like a horror film," added another, outraged that such a thing is happening in the United States in the name of medicine.
More related news coverage can be found at BadMedicine.news.
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