In October 2021, doctors at a Kentucky hospital were moments away from cutting into a man who was declared dead to harvest his organs — until the supposed cadaver started weeping.
"He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed," Natasha Miller, the surgeon who was assigned to perform the procedure, told NPR. "And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly."
Miller claims she and the other two doctors in the room refused to carry out the organ retrieval, so the case coordinator called the Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA) asking what to do.
Its directive, according to what Miller overheard, was to "'find another doctor to do it,'" she told NPR.
The man, 36-year-old Anthony Thomas "TJ" Hoover II, was declared dead at the hospital after a drug overdose, despite his sister claiming she saw signs of life as he was being moved to the operating room. The procedure was ultimately canceled — but the bone-chillingly close call, which was revealed as part of a September congressional hearing into organ procurement organizations, raises tough questions about the protocols surrounding the practice.
"I hope that a case like this really is extreme, but it does reveal some of those underlying issues that can arise when there are disagreements about the determination of death," Matthew DeCamp, an associate professor of Medicine and bioethicist at the University of Colorado, told NPR.
Nyckoletta Martin, an organ preservationist who was among several employees who quit KODA after hearing about the incident, said she reviewed the case notes from that day. According to what she found, the doctors sedated the donor when he woke up and tried to continue with the procedure.
"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 told NPR. "That's horrifying."
Others in the industry say that this has happened before, down to the callous orders given from above. Robert Cannon, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama, recalled an incident when he had already "opened" a supposedly brain-dead patient to prepare their organs for procurement, who suddenly started breathing. The bosses at his area's organ procurement organization (OPO) told him to proceed, but he refused.
"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,'" Cannon told NPR. "And we thought, 'No. We're not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.'"
"This doesn't seem to be a one-off, a bad apple," Greg Segal, co-founder of Organize, a group that advocates for reforms in the extremely strained organ transplant system, told NPR. "I receive allegations like that with alarming regularity."
According to Donna Rhorer, TJ's sister and legal guardian, he now has trouble remembering, walking, and talking.
KODA, however, has denied the most damning allegations made about the incident, though it did confirm that Miller was assigned to TJ's case.
"No one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient," said Julie Bergin, CEO of Network for Hope, the organization that was formed after KODA merged with another network, in a statement to NPR. "KODA does not recover organs from living patients. KODA has never pressured its team members to do so."
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