DEAD

MAN

WALKING

So uh....did he die??

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.

"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.

We want your liver.

"...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.

PUT

THEM

BACK!

NPR has a better article https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/10/16/nx-s1-5113976/organ-transplantion-mistake-brain-dead-surgery-still-alive

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.

Kinda get the feeling the for-profit medical system is deeply corrupt.

IRL borrowing material from House M.D.

About an hour after Hoover had been brought into surgery for his organs to be retrieved, a doctor came out and explained that Hoover “wasn’t ready”. “He woke up,” Rhorer said.

I wonder how far into the surgery they got. I'm assuming either not at all, or like only the initial cut, which may have been what gave the stimulation to knock him out of whatever coma state he was in.

If he was in the actual operating room for a full hour, that's a LONG time for nothing to have happened; but the hospitals I've worked at, there's a holding area where family is allowed to be at the patient's side, then shortly before surgery they get moved to pre-op (no family) for final prep before finally being pushed to the OR, so I suspect a lot of that hour was in pre-op.

...assuming organ harvest cases even go to pre-op - tbh I'm not sure if they do.

I've assisted in a few organ harvest cases, and the surgery itself is absolute madness - each organ system being harvested has its own team who specializes in that system, and they need to be extracted and preserved quickly to ensure they stay viable. So the second the docs get the green light to cut, it's like a pack of lions going to town on a gazelle. The time between initial cut and the donor being an empty carcass is like minutes. As soon as a team gets the organ they're after, they break scrub and leave, so the chaos transitions pretty quickly to this eerie quiet OR with a now not-just-brain-dead but dead dead patient flayed open on the table, blood all over the place since they don't really care about controlling bleeding, supplies all over the floor...

It's literally 6 high speed surgeries at the same time.

Point being - if someone woke up in the middle of that, they're already well passed the point of being completely fucked. You couldn't just call a stop and put it all back together. For real the best thing they could do in that scenario would be to push some general anesthetic to knock the patient back out, then continue the harvest (assuming general anesthetic wouldn't ruin the organs) and try to figure out what the actual fuck happened later.

NPR made it a point to say that some observers worry that the media attention Hoover’s case has drawn could undermine an organ-transplant system with a waiting list of more than 100,000 people. A professor of medical ethics with whom NPR spoke said all indications are that cases like Hoover’s are generally “one-offs that hopefully we’ll be able to get to the bottom of and prevent from ever happening again”.

That was my first thought too. This sounds like a super weird scenario, and while we should definitely dig, I'm a little uneasy about it circulating the web.

But Rhorer defended her decision to go public with Hoover’s story, saying it would be worth sharing if it could “give one other family the courage to speak up or if it could save one other life”.

...and that's the thing - that one life being 'saved' (or more likely: death delayed a bit, beyond the point of being a harvest candidate) is going to doom multiple others to death and prolonged agony. Going public was not a responsible choice. Where they should have gone was to a conference room in that hospital with a bunch docs from that hospitall and from KODA, their ethics board, and their patient advocacy staff, where they could have had every one of their concerns and grievances addressed in extreme detail, and provided to those docs extreme detail on every little gut feeling they had that was putting up red flags that something wasn't right, and possibly identify some potential system improvements - that's the data that could have saved other families from going through this again.