During An Organ Donation, A 36-Year-Old Man Wakes Up

Tragic new information about a case that stunned America has been disclosed by the family of a man who woke up as doctors were getting ready to remove his organs.

In 2021, Thomas ‘TJ’ Hoover II, now 36, was declared brain dead after an overdose sent him to Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Kentucky. 

Donna Rohrer, his sister and primary caregiver, has now revealed he began taking drugs because of anxiety, depression and PTSD that had developed in response to seeing dead bodies in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 

Hoover had also lost two brothers previously to an overdose, and struggled to maintain employment and find a sense of purpose. Just months before he wound up in the hospital, his mother passed away. 

On his late mother’s birthday, Hoover took unspecified drugs and passed out while loading his car. When EMTs arrived to care for him, he had no pulse. 

Days later, after doctors found no signs of brain activity, Hoover’s family decided to remove his life support and allow his organs to be harvested for donation, per his wishes.

But as he was wheeled into the operating room, Hoover woke up, and since then, his story has spread across the country and appears to have led to a wave of people withdrawing their names from organ donor databases.

Over one week after reports about Hoover’s story went live, around 170 people pulled themselves from organ donor registries per day. 

That is 10 times higher than the number of people who removed themselves over the same period in 2023.

Representatives from Gift of Life Michigan, a state-specific organ donation network, told the Associated Press that some of the people who removed their names mentioned Mr Hoover’s case specifically. 

This adds more pressure to what is already a stressed system, where an estimated 17 people in the US die each day waiting for an organ transplant. 

Since 2021, Rhorer and whistleblowers from the hospital have lifted the lid on what happened that day.

They claim doctors told family members that scans showed no activity in Hoover’s brain, and asked if they wanted to fulfil his wishes of becoming an organ donor.

The family agreed to take him off life support and send him for organ donation. From there, officials from Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA) stepped in to coordinate the transplant. 

Natasha Miller, who was working for KODA at the time and in the room during Hoover’s almost-surgery, told CNN that shortly after being wheeled into the transplant room, Hoover began thrashing around, even as his body was shaved and he was draped with a surgical sheet.

She said she saw tears rolling down his face, and in a shock new report, said she saw him shake his head no.

Miller said: ‘No one was comfortable doing the case from the hospital.’

Then, Miller said coordinators called managers at KODA to tell them the case needed to be shut down.

Miller alleged that higher-ups from the organisation pressured in-person staff at Baptist Health to proceed with the surgery, according to CNN’s reporting.

Rhorer and the rest of Hoover’s family didn’t know about what occurred in the operating room until Nycki Martin, a surgical preservationist for KODA at the time, reached out after seeing Rhorer’s post about the ‘miracle’ on TikTok. 

According to CNN, Martin shared details with Rhorer about what happened on the operating table, and the doubt that medical staff had allegedly expressed when preparing Hoover for surgery. 

Rhorer said if she and her family had known there were doubts about his consciousness, ‘we would never have sent him for his organs to be harvested’.  

In response to comments from Martin, Miller and Rhorer, representatives from Network for Hope, the organisation that has absorbed KODA since the 2021 incident, denied the incident. 

Their president and Chief Operating Officer, Julie Bergen, told NPR: ‘No one at KODA has ever been pressured to collect organs from any living patient.

‘KODA does not recover organs from living patients. KODA has never pressured its team members to do so.’ 

The hospital, Baptist Health Richmond, has also insisted ‘the safety of our patients is always our highest priority.

‘We work closely with our patients and their families to ensure our patients’ wishes for organ donation are followed,’ a spokesperson for the hospital told NPR.

The national organisation that oversees transplants, the Health Resources and Services Administration, is reviewing the allegations against KODA and the hospital.

Denying it will just mean more people will withdraw as potential donors, and covering it up makes it much worse and sends a message that they can’t be trusted. They obviously viewed this man as disposable and saw him in terms of profit for dollars, and it isn’t just in Kentucky that we should be worried about; it’s anywhere in the world.

This man wasn’t dead because if he had been, they wouldn’t have been able to harvest his organs, so he would have still been able to feel pain, which seems to me that there is a strong incentive to harvest these body parts even when people are still alive.

It raises the question of how many patients are being used as test subjects while on ventilators, and I am highly surprised that any doctor would harvest any organ from a drug addict – something doesn’t add up.