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.