American Man Declared Brain Dead Awakens Just Before Organ Removal

Concerns over hospital and organ donation procedures were raised after a man from Kentucky woke up right before his organs were to be removed.

According to a report by the US public broadcasting organisation National Public Radio (NPR), Natasha Miller, an employee of Kentucky Hospital, was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor, Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II, into the operating room.

Natasha recognised right away that something wasn’t quite right. The donor appeared to her to be very much alive, even though he had been certified brain dead. 

“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, Kentucky, including the two doctors, who refused to participate in the organ retrieval, she says.

“The procuring surgeon 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.”

Miller says she overheard the case coordinator at the hospital for her employer, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA), call her supervisor for advice.

“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 says. “And she’s like, ‘There is no one else.’ She’s crying-the coordinator-because she’s getting yelled at.”

The case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. In a letter to the US House of Representatives, whistleblower Nyckoletta Martin detailed her observations while working for Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates at the time of the incident.