Man Wakes Up on Operating Table as Doctors Were Harvesting his Organs – The Medical System Places a Higher Value on Your Organs than Your Life
NPR broadcast a show last week about a man who was brought to a Kentucky hospital in 2021 because of a drug overdose, was declared "brain dead", and then ushered into the operating room to harvest his organs. The problem was that he was not dead, and woke up on the operating table, where he began to cry and was "thrashing around", horrified at what was happening. While the doctors stopped immediately with the head surgeon stating "I’m out of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it", the case coordinator at the hospital for Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (KODA) called her supervisor for advice, where they allegedly told her to "find another doctor to do it. We're going to do this case. You need to find someone else." Some of the KODA employees quit over this incident, and some of them had to receive therapy over the trauma this incident caused them. All of this was revealed last month (September, 2024) by a letter Nyckoletta Martin wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which held a hearing investigating organ procurement organizations. KODA stated that this was a mistake, and rarely happens, but others interviewed by NPR disagreed that this was "rare."