A patient declared brain dead woke up as he was about to have his organs removed. An American story which had serious repercussions in France.
This is a story dating from 2021 in the United States which has just resurfaced by the media NPR. TJ Hoover, 36, is pronounced dead after an overdose. The doctors were then preparing to harvest his organs, the thirty-year-old being included on the donor list. During the operation, they suddenly noticed that the patient was still alive, starting to move and even crying according to some accounts. Specialists assured that he was nevertheless brain dead and that his family had made the difficult decision to agree to disconnect him. Despite tests to ensure the organs were viable, staff noticed nothing abnormal.
Today, TJ Hoover is still alive, despite having some difficulty walking or speaking. Witnesses, notably working in the organ harvesting center, decided to break their silence in order to have the procedure re-examined. Several people were heard in September before the Congressional Energy and Commerce Committee. An investigation has been opened, according to the local press.
If this terrible story took place on the other side of the Atlantic, it is already having repercussions in France. According to the Biomedicine Agency, refusals of organ donations have increased since this revelation. She thus noticed an increase in the number of registrations on the national register of refusals, which were ten times more numerous than in normal times. “The fact of conveying this information is very damaging and casts shame on organ donation and transplantation in France,” the Agency responded to AFP on October 22.
An impossible mistake in France?
However, she assures that this “would be impossible in France”, given the procedures for declaring a patient dead. They consist of a series of examinations, in particular by imaging, to avoid any error. Additionally, the Biomedicine Agency added that this reported story is “highly suspicious from the point of view of French anesthesiologists.”
She also wanted to reassure by publishing a article to redefine brain death and re-explain its link with organ donation: “Brain death corresponds to the total and definitive cessation of brain activity: irreversible loss of brain functions leading to death. It is this death, whose diagnosis is very rare (less than 1% of hospital deaths), which allows organ donation, since, despite the total destruction of the brain and the loss of all of its functions, the heart can continue to beat thanks to medical resuscitation techniques”.
Organ donation itself is very regulated, only being practiced in two cases: a living donation for the kidney or the donation of a deceased person after “a rigorous, secure and transparent diagnosis”. According to Doctor Julien Rogier, anesthetist-resuscitator and head of the organ harvesting unit at Bordeaux University Hospital, for TF1there are not the same rules in France and the United States: “The big difference with the United States is that probably, in the case of this American patient, the brain scan is not obligatory, there was no confirmation”.