It’s a tale straight out of a horror movie: A man being readied for organ harvesting who wasn’t quite dead yet.
Now, lawmakers are asking for answers in the case of Anthony Thomas “T.J.” Hoover II, a man who remains very much alive years after the procedure almost took place — and others like him who could be dead if it weren’t for doctors who spotted near misses like his case.
According to a WKYT-TV report published Thursday, Hoover was admitted to the Baptist Health Richmond hospital in Richmond, Kentucky, in October of 2021.
NPR reported Thurdsday that the then-36-year-old was brought there because of a drug overdose.
“October 26, we were told there were no reflexes, he had no reflexes, there was no brain activity, no brain waves,” Donna Rhorer, Hoover’s sister, told WKYT in Thursday’s report. Thus, to the hospital, he was brain dead.
“All I had was my gut instinct for three years that something wasn’t what we were told.”
And, indeed it wasn’t.
After T.J. was removed from life support, his family was told that he was a registered organ donor. According to Rhorer, there were signs that all was not right.
“We had his honor walk Friday afternoon. During his honor walk, his eyes started opening up. He was tracking. His eyes were tracking us around. We were told it was just reflexes, just a normal thing. Who are we to question the medical system?” she said.
After that, he went into organ retrieval surgery.
“About an hour into it, the doctor came out and got us. He said he wasn’t ready. He woke up. But we also hadn’t been told during his heart catheterization that morning, he woke up then. If we had known that, then clearly we would have known he wasn’t brain dead,” she said.
“He made several attempts to say, ‘Hey, I’m here.’ But it was kind of ignored. They finally stopped the procedure because he was showing too many signs of life.”
She took her brother home and was told it wouldn’t be long before he was gone. That was almost three years ago and she’s been caring for him ever since, according to WKYT.
NPR’s report on the case includes a picture of T.J. dancing with his sister on her wedding day in May 2023.
Shockingly, the Hoover case was described as a rather common bioethical concern by the surgeon-in-chief at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Dr. Seth Karp.
“It’s not infrequent that something comes up around the donor and whether or not the donor is dead,” he told WKYT.
“The problem is we’ve had 40 years where there has been no oversight at all of” organ procurement organizations.
Natasha Miller, an organ preservationist who worked with the Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, told NPR that she had also raised the alarm about Hoover.
“He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed,” she said.
“And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly.”
The doctors then said they wanted out.
“The procuring surgeon, he was like, ‘I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it,’ ” Miller told the public broadcaster. “It was very chaotic. Everyone was just very upset.”
The case coordinator at Baptist Health Richmond then called her supervisor at KODA.
“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,’” Miller said.
“And she’s like, ‘There is no one else.’ She’s crying — the coordinator — because she’s getting yelled at.”
Several KODA employees quit over the incident, including organ preservationist Nyckoletta Martin.
“I’ve dedicated my entire life to organ donation and transplant. It’s very scary to me now that these things are allowed to happen and there’s not more in place to protect donors,” Martin told NPR, adding that she wasn’t assigned to the case but had reviewed the case notes after fearing she might be put into action.
“That’s everybody’s worst nightmare, right? Being alive during surgery and knowing that someone is going to cut you open and take your body parts out?” Martin said. “That’s horrifying.”
“Several of us that were employees needed to go to therapy. It took its toll on a lot of people, especially me,” she added.Rhorer told WKYT that she was speaking out to prevent anything similar from happening again.
“In my heart of hearts, I knew something went on, but I compared it to David and Goliath. Who am I to go up against the medical system?” she said.
However, there are those who are willing to speak up — and their voices have reached Washington, D.C., where the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on organ procurement organizations in September. Hoover’s case was one of those that was discussed.
Dr. Robert Cannon, a transplant surgeon who testified before Congress, described a similar incident he witnessed.
“We actually were in the operating room,” he told NPR.
“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,’” said Cannon, who is affiliated with the University of Alabama, Birmingham, but performed the surgery outside the state.
“If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”
He said a representative from the organ procurement organization wanted to proceed, however.
“We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.”
In the meantime, the organ procurement organizations are fighting back on their own, calling complaints about its practices (you guessed it) “misinformation.”
On Oct. 3, in the aftermath of the congressional hearings, the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations released an open letter defending its members’ work.
“For over five years, our nation’s organ procurement organizations (OPOs) – the non-profit, community-based organizations that work with grieving families every day to save lives through transplantation – have been subject to malicious misinformation and defamatory attacks based on hearsay, creating a false narrative that donation and transplant in the U.S. is untrustworthy and broken,” the letter stated.
Well, now that Hoover’s case has become a viral, bioethical mess for the OPOs, they’re in even deeper trouble. And the real victims aren’t just those who might have had their organs harvested, but the 103,000 patients on transplant lists across the United States.
“This doesn’t seem to be a one-off, a bad apple,” Greg Segal — the man behind Organize, a watchdog group that monitors organ procurement, told NPR. “I receive allegations like that with alarming regularity.”
“This is not a one-off,” said Thaddeus Pope, bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota, told NPR. “It has been alleged to happen before.”
In other words, it’s a problem.
If there’s one truly pro-life measure that both the left and the right should be able to agree upon, it’s a robust system of guardrails that ensure that there’s nobody who falls into a gray area when it comes to harvesting and donating organs.
It isn’t just the lives of men like T.J. Hoover and others. It’s the lives of all those who — not wrongly — don’t trust the system and won’t check the organ-donor box on their state-issued ID applications, leaving a shrinking donor pool.
This is a case where we all lose if proper ethical and moral standards can’t be set and agreed upon.
In the meantime, we can take heart in the fact that the Kentucky state attorney general’s office is currently “reviewing” the particulars of Hoover’s case, according to NPR, and, at the federal level, the Health Resources and Services Administration is “investigating these allegations.”
One hopes that where blame is to be apportioned, it is apportioned swiftly, fairly, and in a manner that creates a deterrent effect from nightmare cases like Hoover’s from ever occurring again.
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