Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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.
This article says he was considered brain dead for three years. Where are you getting your extra info from?
This is scary either way.
She was caring for him for three years.
You cannot be brain dead for three years. Brain death is legal death. Once you are declared brain dead, you are officially a cadaver and won't be going home. You are going to the morgue that day, with possibly a brief initial stop in the operating room if you're an organ donor.
That's not the case (at least in Germany). Being brain dead does not replace the conscious decision on when to disable life support.
If you think google his name you can see a picture of him riding in a car with his sister in 2023 so he's clearly not braindead.
We all know those drivers
"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.
It depends on how you define, "in the middle". According to NPR he had woken up during his heart catheter to check it's health for donation and they just sedated him back down. It was when he went into the final operating room that they refused to do the organ removal. That's past all the checks that are supposed to be done. If he wasn't visibly writhing on the table and crying he'd be dead.
Your mixing organ procurement after cardiac death with brain death. It's the cardiac death donations where they have to move very fast to reduce the warm ischemia time.
For brain death they can be systematic, corneas sure, but for major organs usually kidneys first, bowel, liver, pancreas if usable (usually with bickering about which team gets more vena cava and aorta). Heart and lungs are functioning throughout the abdominal portion to keep them well perfused, then each is flushed and chilled as it's passed off. So there is a period of time of ongoing surgery for this to occur.
But you're right, the process to declare brain death is lengthy and very formalized. Then while someone from anesthesia is in the room to maintain the body, they are not giving anesthesia. And definitely right about the last point, but it's a big fuck up.
"...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.
There was a case Texas a few years back where the Dad of the kid took his gun to the hospital because they were going to pull the plug and harvest his organs. He thought that his kid wasn’t brain dead.
They were wondering what they would do with this nut job when the kid started moving.
He wasn’t brain dead and the Dad was right.
Wow, what a story 😬 I wonder how many of these there are? Of course they want to keep them out of the public, but damn. Even one is too much.
Without looking at the actual numbers, the likelihood of this is probably far less than waking up from any surgery in general.
Which is still less likely than actually dying during elective surgery.
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.
I suspect that when they declared him brain dead, it was too early in recovering from the overdose that his reflexes weren't normal yet.
Drug interactions and drug metabolism are complete unknowns, as I strongly suspect this guy did not have genomic testing done before they administered narcan or whatever antidotes they needed to push.
This isn't something that gets done like after a few hours or a day or something. It takes quite some time to get through cooling protocols, warming again, complete all the testing, geting everything stable. Talking like a week plus at the quickest. And cranial nerve reflexes are just one thing of many different tests done. And to boot, it sounds like from the article they knew he had cranial nerve reflexes, which anyone halfway competent should know, means there is certainly not brain death. Really want to know what this hospital was doing that they messed up so badly.
Kinda get the feeling the for-profit medical system is deeply corrupt.
Capitalism is inherently corrupt
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,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”
Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says.
interesting
That's so fucking dark
That is dark, but you should include that it's a different case. At least one person has already shared it as being this case.
If I'm at that point, and I breathe, just keep going. Full send it. Good luck finding a useful organ among the bunch, though.
What a shitshow.
This kind of shit is going to hurt people needing organs a lot. We need better organ donor safeguards so these kind of scandals dont happen.
Though honestly, it sounds more like some of the speciliasts fucked up than the procedure being bad.
So uh....did he die??
Nope. The npr article has a picture of him dancing with his sister at her wedding three years after the incident.
Oh that is a relief
Well, don't get too comfy. It's still a wild ride, and it appears it is more frequent than you may imagine.
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.
Going public is pretty much always the correct decision.
I don't want a healthcare system where fuck-ups are covered up in order to influence decisions of the patients.
That's not a slippery slope, that's a greased fireman's pole to corruption.
This whole thing is nuts to me. From the way the article reads, the patient was likely still breathing and had a heartbeat. I get wanting to keep organs fresh, but this seems... non ideal
That's a defining feature of brain dead. Otherwise, they're just dead.
We are our brain activity and once that's gone for good all that's left is the biological machine that we live within.
A heart will beat as long as it doesn't die or otherwise suffer some other structural failure. They attach brain dead patients to a ventilator to continue respiration to keep the now-vacant body alive. It's a shame someone severely fucked up and compromised the safety and trust of the process in this case but don't let this confuse you into thinking there's no basis for the transplant to occur in the presence of a heartbeat.
Nah that's not unusual. Brain trauma or degradation can and often does leave someone with a beating heart but little to no hope of ever being conscious again - hence the term brain death.
DEAD
MAN
WALKING