Ep 57-Organ Donation Disasters

The scariest part of modern medicine isn’t always the unknown, it’s the moment you realize the system can build momentum before certainty feels complete. We’re talking about organ donation disasters and near misses that force one brutal question: how do we know someone is truly dead when organ procurement is on the clock? Using the reported case of TJ Hoover in Kentucky, we trace how a single story can crack public trust, especially when families say they saw signs of life and later reporting suggests professionals inside the process had concerns too.

If this raises questions for you, we want to hear them. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find Doctoring the Truth.

Resources:

LEX 18, “KY man wakes during organ harvesting procedure, prompting federal investigation.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “HHS Finds Systemic Disregard for Sanctity of Life in Organ Transplant System; Announces Major Initiative for Reform.”

UNOS, “Understanding Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD).”

UNOS, “U.S. surpassed 48,000 organ transplants in 2024.”

House Energy and Commerce Committee, “Ensuring Patient Safety: Oversight of the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplant System.”

ABC News, “Patient ‘Wakes Up’ as Doctors Prepare to Remove Organs.”
Oklahoma Gazette, “Oklahoma man who lived through being pronounced dead appears on Today.”

Transcript

Cold Open And Snow Talk

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Amanda! Jenna! How are you? I'm good. I'm always on the seat of my pants waiting for what that opening's gonna be like. I know. You know what? I forgot. Hold on.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Oh yeah. Oh, you know what? I don't have my headphones on, that's why I didn't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:04

Well how the heck are you again?

SPEAKER_03 1:18

We're doing well. I'm how are you?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Good. Listen, I'm hardly DJ Mix a lot at this point, but we will we we'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Sometimes you, you know, it's learning curve.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Right? Or learning cliff. You know, either way, we're still learning. Just throw ourselves in the deep end and see what happens. There's something to that. There's a whole philosophy about how you shouldn't wait until you think you can do something perfectly. You just need to get out there and make a mess. And then stuff can come from that.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

That makes sense. I feel like that's hard for people like us, or I'll talk about myself, I guess. Uh you know, when usually things come easy, then when things are hard, it's like, well, this sucks.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

It's really hard. I have to work at this? Dang.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

I'm like, I'm I'm usually really good at things. This is hard. Hello, hello, me and math.

SPEAKER_04 2:16

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

Well, I got the shock of my life when I left work today, and I'm all bundled up because it was 10 degrees this morning and it was 50. I mean, I had to call in Monday because I was under a foot and a half of snow. What's going on? Love it.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah. Yeah. My dog has been having the time of her life out in all of the snow. I think we got 18-ish inches. And she's been loving it. Loving it.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Yeah. Oh, it's so cute to see dogs that love the snow.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

I my Corgulite. Sorry, I have to say this because it's really cute. I saw this thing online. Someone posted a video of their uh golden retrievers like jumping through the snow. And it very much looked like Raven. And they called them the Midwest dolphins. Dolphins of the Midwest. Because that's kind of how they like gallop through the snow.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Oh my gosh. Yeah. They do like butterfly stroke, you know, to get through the yes, absolutely, the dolphins. So my I love that. No, my Corgi. I just want to sign my Corgi up to be a Minnesota dolphin as well, because that's what she does. The Chihuahua is a different story. She hates it. She didn't like to get her feed wet.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

I'm surprised either of them were able to get outside to do anything without disappearing in adult. No, they would have.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

We had to, you know, basically plow the backyard like a little path, a little circular path. Sure. By the bird bath and then the tree house and everything, so they could do their regular rounds and bark at things. And yeah. Sure. That's all I wanted to say. Dolphins. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Isn't that so cute? So then I was watching her like gallop around out in the drifts like that. And I was like, oh my gosh, you two look like a little dolphin. So cute.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

Adorable.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

You should put a fin on her next time. Well, it's supposed to be 70 degrees this weekend. So by the time I get a fin, the snow will be gone. Maybe next winter, though.

Sponsor Handful Activewear

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Gosh. Well, we can wait however long it takes because bring the nice weather. Bring it. Bring it out. Do we have a correction for last week? I think it I think the correction is at the end when I thought I was trumpeting and like playing music, and I'm dancing around, and somehow it wasn't being picked up by the recording. So it was a very confusing ending for everyone else but me who thought I was in a little bit of music background. So there's that. I don't I can't think of anything else. No, I don't think so. Not that I can remember. Shall we talk about our first sponsor? We shall. And by we, I mean me. I'm talking about handful activewear. Can't give it up. I'm so in love with this company. They have redefined what women's activewear should be. Designed by women for women, and that is why they're awesome. Handful sports bras and compression leggings are made to move with you no matter how you work out or live your life. From yoga and running to strength training and everything in between, this is gear that adapts, supports, and performs. Each piece is crafted with moisture wicking fabric, serious support, and a sleek, flattering fit that looks just as good outside the gym as it does inside, which is good because I'm hardly ever inside a gym. Handful stands out by creating multifunctional activeware that empowers women to feel strong, confident, and comfortable all day long. Once you try Handful, you'll feel the difference. Upgrade your activewear and experience the freedom to move, perform, and live without limits. Shop handful activeware now at handful.com and use our code STAYSUSPIOUS for a whopping 30% off. Oh wait, I think I have those.

unknown 6:14

Hold on.

Organ Donation Disasters Begin

The TJ Hoover Case

SPEAKER_02 6:15

A hand horn. Oh a handful horn. All right. So today, folks, we're gonna be talking about organ donation disasters. Yeah. So I think that says it all in terms of trigger warnings. And again, I say if you're triggered, we're talking about organ donation disasters. So just be warned. I've got a bunch of sources, and those will all be in our show notes. Shall we start? Yeah. All right. So in the version of medicine that most people want to believe in, there's a bright line between the living and the dead. On one side of that line, doctors treat, stabilize, operate, resuscitate, and improvise. On the other side, they stop, they document, they call the family, they explain what happens next. And if organ donation enters the conversation, it enters only after that line has been crossed clear, clearly, carefully, and beyond doubt. That is the promise. But in October 2021, in Richmond, Kentucky, that line began to look much less stable. A man named Anthony Thomas T.J. Hoover II had been hospitalized after an overdose. According to his family's later account, they were told he was brain dead. At that point, the story should have moved into a grim but familiar direction, the conversations that no family wants to have, the paperwork, the preparations for organ donation, and the attempt to make meaning out of a catastrophe. Instead, the family says they began seeing things that did not fit the version of events that they were being given. Even as the process moved towards donation, they believed TJ was showing signs that he might still be alive. What makes the case so disturbing is that it didn't stay confined to one family's memory of an impossible day. Later reporting said Hoover had been declared brain dead, prepared for donation, and then showed signs of life serious enough that the organ recovery did not go forward. He survived. That would have been enough on its own to leave a permanent mark on everyone in the room. A family can spend years trying to make sense of a moment like that, replaying what they saw, what they were told, what they almost agreed to, and how close the whole thing may have come to ending differently. But Hoover's case didn't stay at the level of private trauma. What gave the story so much force was that concern didn't remain confined to the family's account. Later reporting said people involved in the donation process also described Hoover showing signs in the operating room that they believed were inconsistent with death. Don't you love these phrasings? Inconsistent with death.

SPEAKER_03 9:08

In other words, freaking alive, people. So in other words, freaking alive. Alive.

unknown 9:16

Yeah.

Other Near Donation Cases

SPEAKER_02 9:17

So I mean the organ recovery did not proceed, and Hoover survived, but that changed the shape of the story. Because there's a difference between a family saying, Well, we thought he was alive, and a person involved in organ procurement with experience saying, Well, something here didn't look right. The first sounds emotional and the second sounds procedural. And when those two accounts start pointing in the same direction, institutions lose the ability to dismiss the story as nothing more than trauma colliding with confusion. So that's part of why the case resurfaced so powerfully years after it happened. Not because one dramatic image finally escaped into public view, but because the story gained credibility from inside the process itself. And as the story widened, it moved beyond one family, one hospital room, and one set of memories and became a national story, and then a federal oversight story, and eventually a congressional one. But before we go any further, it's worth saying plainly that this is not an argument. The story is not an argument against organ donation. It can't be, not honestly, because organ transplantation saves lives on an enormous scale. UNOS says more than 100,000 people in the United States are waiting for a transplant. And in 2024, the country performed 48,149 organ transplants, the first time it had ever exceeded 48,000 in a single year. UNOS also says donation after circulatory death or DCD accounted for 43% of all deceased donors in 2024. So the need is real, the shortage is real, and the recipient side of the story is real. But the reason a case like Hoover's becomes so explosive is that donation also depends on trust. And the public tends to imagine that trust resting on a fairly simple sequence is that a person dies, the family's notified, and then only then does the donation begin. In reality, the process is much more structured and much more time-sensitive than most people realize. There are professionals whose job it is to evaluate whether or not donation is possible in the first place. And there's rules about who determines death and when. There are procurement coordinators, transplant teams, recipient matches, operating room logistics, and biological windows that close quickly. Organs cannot simply be recovered at any time under any condition. So once donation becomes possible, the process has a clock inside it. There are also different pathways to donation, and that distinction matters. Sometimes donation happens after brain death, meaning death has been determined by neurological criteria. And sometimes it happens after circulatory death when the heart and breathing have irreversibly stopped. Those are not interchangeable categories, and they do not always feel interchangeable to families, even if the language around them can blur together in moments of crisis. To the family, the words often collapse into one thing: your loved one is gone. But inside the medical system, the pathway matters because the timing, criteria, and safeguards can differ depending on how death is being determined. And that is part of what makes stories like Hoover so destabilizing. Most people aren't sitting in hospital rooms with a working knowledge of death determination standards. They're sitting there exhausted, frightened, sad, trying to understand whether the person in the bed is still a patient in the fullest sense of the word, or whether the system has already begun to think of that body as a donor. The public tends to imagine organ donation as something that begins after certainty. Cases like this are frightening because they create an impression, fair or unfair, accurate in every detail or not, that certainty may not always feel as settled inside the process as the public assumes it is. And that's when the whole thing starts to feel different. Not like a gift after death, but like a race against a line that everyone in the room needs to be absolutely sure has already been crossed. Part of the reason TJ Hoover's story spread so quickly is that it didn't arrive in a vacuum. By the time his name entered the news, there were already other cases people half remembered. Not always with the details intact and not always with the names attached, but with the central image preserved. A patient believed to be dead, a donation process already moving forward, and then some sign at the last moment that the certainty everyone was acting on may have come too soon. And I just a side note the whole reason I doing this episode is because of if you remember what we learned was called creepypasta, not crazy pasta, where I had, was it I sent you, I think, or did you send me a video of a guy climbing out of a third floor hospital window because he was entered into like he was considered brain dead or whatever, and he was being prepped for organ donation, and he was alive, and they were just kind of like, eh, you're already here, you know. Like basically he was alive and had enough of aliveness to be able to jump out a third story window. Very consistent with alive. I was like, this is horrific. What the heck? How did this happen?

SPEAKER_00 14:48

And there are all these comments about what hospital it was, and like, oh my god, because he was also yelling, like, there's more in there, they're trying to take all my organs.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

Yeah, so but you can see where this stuff starts, and it was very believe, I believed it until because it was like a grainy photo, it wasn't like an AI, like it was AI, but it didn't jump out at me as AI in the beginning. Anyway, I did some research and it's creepy pasta, but you can see where it comes from because there's usually some grain of something that had happened before things become folklore, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

And and I and I think so that's what led me to well, could this happen and has it happened? And so that's how this episode came into fruition. But one of the clearest comparisons to what happened to TJ is a woman named Colleen Burns in Syracuse, New York. In 2009, Burns was hospitalized after a drug overdose. Later reporting said a chain of errors at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center led staff towards organ procurement after concluding that she had experienced cardiac death. According to later state findings, just before organ recovery was about to begin, Burns opened her eyes and looked up at the operating lights. The state later cited the hospital, and the case stayed in public memory for years. But part of what makes Burns so memorable is how stark the scene is. She wasn't in an early stage of uncertainty with everyone still openly debating what they were seeing. She was at the edge of organ recovery. Like I can just picture the knife was poised. The room had already been arranged around the assumption that death had been settled. But Burns also matters because, like Hoover, she was an overdose patient. So that overlope that overlap does not prove that the same thing happened in both cases. And it doesn't mean overdose patients are uniquely at risk of being treated as dead when they're not, but it does make the later federal findings that we're going to talk about in Kentucky harder to ignore because this investigatory body in Kentucky specifically said that its review found problems with misclassification of causes of death, particularly in overdose cases. And we'll talk more about that.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

I was wondering if that was going to be a theme.

Chart Note Good News In Medicine

Federal Review And Kentucky Findings

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Yeah. Well, there's Zach Dunlap to take that theme down a notch because in 2007, Dunlap was badly injured in an ATV crash and declared brain dead at a Texas hospital. Later reporting said organ donation discussions were already underway before signs suggested that he was still alive. He survived, and his case became one of the most widely remembered stories in this category. What's striking about Dunlap is that the public memory of his case is slightly different from Burns. So with Burns, the horror sits in the operating room. You know, she's about to go under the knife and her eyes open. With Dunlap, the horror sits earlier in the very fact of the declaration itself. It became one of the cases that people cite when they begin asking whether brain death determinations are always as clear and final as the public assumes. That distinction matters because it shows that this fear isn't confined to one type of donation pathway or one narrow kind of mistake. It stretches across different cases, different clinical settings, and different forms of death determination, but it keeps circling the same question. How sure was everyone really? Scary. I know. But meanwhile, it's time for a chartno. Oh, that was nice. A little harmony there. Unintentional harmony. Woo-hoo, the best guy. That never happens. Not on this show. Welcome to the Chart No segment where we learn about what's happening in medicine and healthcare. This week's bright spot starts with pain medicine. In January 2025, the FDA approved Jornovex or Suzetrogen, a first-in-class non-opioid analgesic for moderate to severe acute pain in adults. The FDA said it works by targeting a pain signaling pathway in the peripheral nervous system before pain signals reach the brain, and called it the first approved drug in a new class of pain medicines. In clinical trials for acute surgical pain, it reduced pain more than placebo. And that matters because medicine has spent years trying to solve a very hard problem. How do you treat serious pain without defaulting to opioids every time? So this doesn't end the opioid crisis. It's not meant for every kind of pain, but it's a real sign that the pipeline for non-opioid pain treatment is finally producing something concrete. The second bright spot is farther upstream in the research world. The National Institute of Health 2025 research highlights pointed to progress in engineering CART CAR T cells inside the body, an approach that could eventually make these immune cell therapies more accessible and less cumbersome to deliver. The National Institute of Health also highlighted new work on treatments for rare diseases in children, brain computer interfaces, and cervical cancer advances as part of its 2025 Human Health and Medical Findings Roundup. And one more note, this time at the health system level, in December 2025, the World Health Organization and World Bank reported that since 2000, most countries have made progress on universal health coverage, with the global service coverage index rising from 54 to 71 between 2000 and 2023. So the year 2000 and the year 2023, while the share of people facing financial hardship from health costs fell from 34% to 26% between the year 2000 and 2022. The report also made clear that huge gaps remain, but it's still a reminder that healthcare progress is not only about miracle drugs and futuristic devices. Sometimes it's about more people getting care and fewer people being financially wrecked for trying to stay alive. So that's this week's chart note: a new non-opioid pain drug, promising cell therapy research and slow, imperfect, but real progress in getting health care to more people. Let's hope that reaches the states. And now back to the story. By the time TJ Hoover's case became national news, it had already stopped looking like one terrible isolated event. At first, it was possible to understand it as one man in one Kentucky hospital, one donation process that may have advanced much farther than it should have, and one room in which different people seemed to be operating from very different ideas of what was happening. But the more attention the case received, the harder it became to leave it there. What changed the scale of the story was what happened when federal investigators looked beyond Hoover himself. In July 2025, HHS said that HRSA had reviewed 351 Kentucky cases in which organ donation had been authorized but not completed. Out of those, the department said 103 cases had what it called, quote, concerning features, end quote. 73 involved neurological signs incompatible with donation. In other words, these people are alive.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

And at least 20 inconsistent with death. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

And at least 28 patients may not have been deceased when organ procurement was initiated. Let me say that again. At least 28 patients may not have been deceased when organ procurement was initiated. That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

I uh Do they do they know once they start? Or how do how do we know?

SPEAKER_02 22:55

I guess that's what this whole thing is about. Unless they open their eyes or sit up.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

I mean So because I I'm I mean there must be some way that they can tell later, I suppose maybe with the brain, because otherwise how do they have a number of 28? Oh, may not have been deceased.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

When the when they were actually starting to get in there and get the organs out. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't say like the organs were actually removed, and then we went, oops, that person was probably alive. It's more like, you know, the knife went in. I don't know, I didn't want to think about it. But like that's yeah, that's too late. You know, if you're doing that, that's this creeps me out.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

And can you imagine being trapped inside your body and knowing what's happening? But like you can't say anything.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Worst nightmare. That and being buried alive, but oh gosh, how morbid can we get?

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Okay, so I know, and I just thought that too, because then I reminded me of the how what did they call it? A dead ringer where they used to put the bell inside the casket.

Congressional Oversight And System Trust

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Yes, yes. So the as a like, okay, well, if you get people were so afraid of being buried alive that they used to in the 1800s put these bells. So if you were alive, you could pull a string, like they'd put the end of the string in the in the corpse's hand, but then the bells would just ring all of a sudden, and it was because of the gases from natural deep moving things. Oh my god, that's so creepy. That's so creepy. All right, well, Health and Human Services also said the review found poor neurological assessments, poor coordination with medical teens, questionable consent practices, and misclassification of causes of death, especially in overdose cases. So, I mean, this is the stuff we can control, folks. Get it together. Let's get better at this stuff. So that's the point where the story changes shape because up to then Hoover could still be described as a terrifying anomaly. Like, you know, maybe this was one badly handled case with contested details, one nightmare that spiraled in the headlines because it touched a public fear that people already had. But we're talking about a federal review of 351 cases that doesn't read like an anomaly. It reads like someone finally stepped back far enough to ask whether the problem had been bigger than this one patient all along. And the language of that review is part of what made it so explosive. Concerning features sounds almost sterile until you stop and look at what the fake the phrase contains. Neurological signs incompatible with donation, patients who may not have been dead when procurement began, and consent practices serious enough to be flagged by federal investigators, these aren't small process problems. They go to the center of how the system is supposed to function. The federal announcement set the stage for Congress. So on July 22nd, 2025, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, they love their long titles, held a hearing titled Ensuring Patient Safety: Oversight of the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplant System. The hearing brought together HRSA, UNOS, current and former OPTN leadership, and the CEO of Network for Hope, which is the organ procurement organization tied to the Kentucky findings. And that witness list tells you what the committee was trying to do. This wasn't a hearing built around one family retelling their terrible day. Congress put the federal regulator, the National Transplant Network, the current and former OPTN leadership, and the Kentucky Procurement Organization in the same room. The point was not simply to revisit Hoover's case, it was to ask how a case like Hoover's had happened and what the oversight system had done with warning signs, and whether the failures were limited to just Kentucky. The committee's public framing was direct. Subcommittee chairman John Joyce said that what happened in these cases required discussion and oversight. Chairman Brett Guthrie said the committee needed people to admit that there were problems to fix. Ranking member Frank Pallone described the hearing as an examination of serious concerns about the organ donation system and what needed to change. Congress wasn't treating this as a communications issue, it was treating it as a patient safety issue. I mean, I would say patient safety of the deepest kind. Life or death. And one of the most important things to come out of the hearing was that the committee did not seem satisfied that Kentucky was just a one-off issue. Yeah, for real. In a later bipartisan committee summary, lawmaker said Representative Aaron Huchen asked HRSA's Dr. Raymond Lynch whether the problem was limited to the Kentucky organ procurement organization. According to the committee, his answer was blunt. Unfortunately, quote, this is a quote, unfortunately, it is not limited to KYDA, end quote. The committee said Lynch testified that HRSA had received concerns from areas served by other organ procurement organizations as well, and that widened the story immediately. The issue was no longer only what happened in Kentucky. The issue was whether Kentucky had exposed a broader weakness inside the transplant system itself. The hearing put pressure on the national oversight structure as well. HHS had already said that an earlier committee had closed the original case without action before HRSA reopened it. So during the hearing, Chairman Joyce entered HRSA's investigative report and a correction action plan into put a correction action plan into the record. Congress was building a formal oversight trail around what HRSA had found and what federal corrective steps had already been demanded. There was another point of tension too, whether parts of the system were resisting scrutiny. I mean, we live in a world where most of us resist scrutiny if we've got something to hide, right? Committee materials later highlighted an exchange involving Representative Gary Palmer and UNO CEO Maureen McBride about an open letter from the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations that criticized the oversight effort as misinformation. McBride acknowledged that she had signed it. The committee later signaled concern about what that message might communicate to regulators and whistleblowers. So that so the hearing was not only about the underlying patient safety events, it was also about whether the institutions under scrutiny were fully cooperating with scrutiny in the first place. And the hearing didn't end with the committee's involvement. On September 12, 2025, bipartisan committee leaders sent a letter to HRSA asking for a briefing on its continuing oversight of patient safety in the organ procurement and transplant system. In public materials about that letter, the committee said the hearing testimony, HRSA's findings, and reports of similar patterns elsewhere all raised serious concerns and showed the need for further oversight. There were also later consequences outside the hearing room. Committee materials later tied the July hearing and the follow-up oversight to continued HHS safety actions, including further safety guidance for the transplant system and later enforcement actions against another organ procurement organization. Congress didn't carry those actions out itself, but it continued linking its oversight to what federal agencies were doing afterwards. So the sequence matters. First, Hoover's case became public. Then HRSA looked beyond Hoover and said it found troubling patterns in hundreds of Kentucky cases. Then Congress had a hearing and brought the federal regulator, the Kentucky OPO, UNOS, and OPTN leadership under questioning. And then the committee followed up, asked for more briefings, and treated the issue as ongoing rather than resolved. That is what moved the story out of the realm of one unforgettable case and into the realm of institutional doubt. Because one of the reasons stories like this do so much damage is that the transplant system depends on a kind of trust that very few other areas of medicine require so openly. Most medical care happens inside a framework that the public broadly understands. If you have pneumonia, you get antibiotics. If you have appendicitis, you get surgery. If something goes wrong, people may feel angry or devastated, but the basic structure of the encounter remains familiar. The doctor is trying to save the patient in front of them, but organ donation is different. Because once donation becomes possible, the system's trying to do two things at once. It's caring for the dying patient and it's trying not to lose the chance to save someone else. Those goals are not supposed to conflict, but to the public, cases like Hoover can make them look as though they might. And that fear becomes even more potent because the donor side of transplantation is the side the public hears about least. Most transplant stories are recipient stories. They're about second chances, resumed lives, people leaving the hospital with organs they never thought they would get. But the donor side is usually narrated in broad, reverent language: a gift, a sacrifice, a final act of generosity. What gets lost in that language is how vulnerable the donor side really is. Because before a donor is a donor, they're a patient who cannot speak for themselves, whose body is being interpreted by other people, and whose family is being asked to make or affirm decisions in the middle of an extraordinary crisis. And when a story like Hoover's breaks open, the public suddenly sees the donor side not as serene and settled, but as a room, a process, a timeline, and a body being watched for signs. That is a very different picture from the one most people think they're signing on to when they check the donor box on their driver's license.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

I think that's what makes this hard art case so hard to shake, is it's not just the question of whether one thing went wrong, it's the possibility that the system might not be as certain as everyone wants it to be. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

And that's what changes the emotional feel of the whole story. Once you start wondering whether the process can develop its own momentum, like the donor side of the system stops feeling abstract.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

It starts feeling very human and for families, that has got to be unbearable because you're being asked to trust the system at the exact moment when you're at least able to what? Like interrogate it, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

Yeah, and you're exhausted, you're devastated, you're grieving, you're dependent on other people to tell you what's true. I mean, this is why the trust piece matters so much.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

And it also makes sense why stories like this would travel so far, right? Like a big footprint for these stories, because even if the cases are rare, they're gonna hit something really deep.

SPEAKER_02 33:50

They do. They hit something with me. I mean, I I I didn't even know that any of this was possible. But the first time I ever got my driver's license and signed up to be an organ donor, I thought, huh, I wonder if they'll I wonder if I'll be considered less alive. Right, right. You know, you know, ooh, we got a we got a live one here. Yeah, she'll probably die anywhere, you know. Yeah. So and that's it wasn't obviously these cases weren't like a volitional, like it wasn't somebody going, eh, give or take, let's just take, you know, it was certainty. That's I guess that's what bothers me. Is it wasn't nefariousness, it's it was something with the system of how do you tell if someone's really dead?

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Yeah, I still want to know the answer to the question. Right? If you out there are listening and you work with organ donation, please let us know. Because I like the point that you said too. It's like when people think about organ donation, we think about the happy stories, the person that was saved or that selfless act of the person. Like, yeah. I mean, maybe other people think about the flip side, but I don't. Usually I'm like, oh, that's so sweet. And like, what a great story, what a miracle, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

And as a donor yourself, like that's what you're hoping for, right? Right. We're not going into it going, I hope I'm dead. You know, yeah. Right. You're doing it uh because it it it's your last act of you know, all of that's true.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

It's just I don't it's just we don't want to have to wonder if we were dead.

SPEAKER_02 35:34

Yeah, and I don't want families to have to wonder, and I feel like I thought I was a lot more black and white. You're here or you're not. Yeah, that's what's troubling, I think. You would guess. Because apparently it's not. I'd be like, do some ice water calorics on me or something.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Get that irrigator out. Well, thank you for bringing us those stories of the individuals, but also just the story at large of oh my gosh. Like you said, I thought this would be black and white. Scary.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

I don't know what the lesson is because I don't want people to not donate. I know. Uh I get I guess, okay, here's the lesson is that I'm really glad that they took it from one case to Kentucky cases, to the courts, to the higher courts, and something's being done about it. Because obviously if we can change the system, if there's something that they can find that in the system to change, please do it before I die.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

So that I'm yeah. Just like the case of the gal I covered that received an incompatible organ.

unknown 36:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Like as long as we can see procedural changes and people are like doing their best out there trying to you know put processes into place to prevent said tragedies from happening. That's that's what we can highlight at the end of these. Yeah, I like that. Well then, are we medical mishaping?

SPEAKER_02 37:08

Yeah, I think after a story like that we can do that.

Medical Mishap Wrong Side Procedure

SPEAKER_01 37:13

I think we could. Go for it. All right, well, let's shift gears. This email is titled Don't Assume They Are on the Right Side. Oh. Dear Dear Amanda, Jenna, baby Alley Cat, and listener Alley Cats.

SPEAKER_03 37:34

Hello. Got everybody covered. Yep. Hello.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

I love your pod and look forward to learning something new every week. I feel like I know you guys at this point and that we are good friends. Hi. Hello. Hello. Here's my medical mishap for you. Sorry, I had to fight a yawn. Okay. A few years ago, I went in for what was supposed to be a very simple outpatient procedure. Nothing dramatic, nothing life-threatening, just one of those things where they tell you you'll be in and out. And honestly, the worst part is probably the paperwork. Isn't that the truth? Or the bill. Yeah. Yeah, or that part after. So of course I showed up hungry, nervous, weirdly early, because I'm one of those people who thinks arriving 45 minutes ahead of time will somehow protect me from all future suffering. Everything was going normally at first. I got checked in, changed into the world's least dignified gown, and climbed onto the bed. A nurse came in, very nice, very efficient, and asked me the usual questions: name, date of birth, allergies, and what procedure we were doing that day. I answered all of them correctly. LOL, good for you. Which felt like an achievement considering I was already running on fear and no breakfast. Then another staff member came in a little later and asked me again what the what procedure I was there for. So I told her she nodded, wrote something down, and left. A third person came in and asked again, what in the what in the heck is going on, guys? At that point, I started feeling less like a patient and more like a contestant on a game show where the grand prize is sedation. Then the doctor came in. He introduced himself, smiled, and said, All right, we're here to take care of your left side today. My problem was on the right. I laughed, not because it was funny exactly, but because sometimes when your brain panics, your body picks the worst possible reaction. I understand that. I get that. So I laughed and said, Well, I hope not, because if you do that, we're going to have a very bad afternoon. And the doctor just stopped. He looked at the chart, looked at me, looked back at the chart, and then he said the sentence, No patient wants to hear five minutes before procedure. Huh? That's what this person wrote. The doctor said, huh? He left the room. Oh my gosh. And then to just leave? I would leave at this point.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

Yeah, I think we all need to leave at this point.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

Yeah, we're all we're all exiting together. Goodbye. But now I know in the hindsight, this is where I'm supposed to say I bravely advocated for myself and used my voice. What I actually did was lie there in a paper gown, staring at the ceiling, thinking, well, this is how people end up on the local news.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

A few minutes later, and actually, depending on how big the hospital was, probably not even ending up on the news. Sorry, that was my insert. I'm just saying I've worked for big hospitals. They got money to keep things out of the news. Anyway. Anyway, back to the story. A few minutes later, three people came back in, now moving with very particular energy of people who are trying to look calm in front of a patient while also realizing something has gone sideways. There had been a scheduling error somewhere along the line. What? Those don't ever happen.

unknown 41:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

My my paperwork was correct in one part of the chart and wrong in another. And apparently the wrong detail had started to snowball. So there I was, not yet medicated, suddenly becoming the final defensive barrier between myself and the wrong procedure, which on one hand is not a role I had requested. On the other hand, I absolutely nailed it. Yes, you did.

SPEAKER_03 41:42

Nailed it!

SPEAKER_01 41:43

Nailed it. They corrected everything, re-verified it six more times, marked the correct side, and the procedure itself went fine. But what I remember so vividly is what happened afterward. My nurse came by to check on me and I said, So hypothetically, how close was I to becoming a cautionary tale? She laughed, and in a way that healthcare workers do when they're trying to be reassuring without technically admitting anything. And she told me, This is exactly why we ask you over and over again. It can feel repetitive, but redundancy is safety. And honestly, that stuck with me because before that day, I thought all those repeated questions were just annoying hospital bureaucracy. After that day, I realized they're because human beings are human beings. Someone types the wrong thing, someone hears the wrong word, someone clicks the wrong box, and if nobody catches it, it's the patient that pays for it. So, yes, I did spend part of the day wondering whether I was about to get the medical equivalent of an oil change in the wrong lane, but I also walked away with a very real respect for checklists, double checks, and speaking up when something feels off. Also, I now answer every pre-op question like I'm a or like I'm diffusing a bomb. Thanks for reading this, lady. Stay safe and stay suspicious of which side they want to do your procedure on. Love, Rachel.

SPEAKER_02 43:10

Oh my God, Rachel. Thank you for this because I am now answering every pre-op question like I'm diffusing a bomb, is one of the most relatable sentences I've ever heard. This is kind of story. It sounds funny when you tell it later, and thank God you can tell it later, but it carries a real lesson. A lot of what keeps patients safe in medicine isn't glamorous. It's not some brilliant house style, sorry, Dr. House, as in Amanda. Diagnostic revelation, it's repetition, checklists, and confirmation. One more person asking your name, your birthday, and why you're there.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

And then when you are the patient, that can feel really absurd. Like, why am I saying this again? Didn't I already answer that? And how many people work here? And why do none of you talk to each other? Because also I was wondering is like after the first person and then the second person and the third person all realize this was wrong, like how much time was in between all of these people?

SPEAKER_03 44:10

Right?

SPEAKER_01 44:12

Well, uh, but stories like this, you guys, our reminder that those repetitive little rituals are often the only thing standing between a harmless typo and a really freaking bad day.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

Right? Because not only would you have had surgery on the wrong side, but you still have to go back and get the right side done, the correct side done. I would think, right? If depending on what this is, depending on what it was.

SPEAKER_04 44:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

Yeah. So I guess if a doctor says left, your problems on the right, laugh, panic, whatever, but say something for sure. Cause make sure you say something. Yeah, you don't want to be on the news, or even if you're in a big organization, a teaching case that doesn't make the news just because you know somebody had a rough morning. So yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_03 45:03

Thank you, Rachel.

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SPEAKER_02 45:04

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SPEAKER_01 45:18

I don't even know how it's been another week since we did this. I don't know. I gotta do that still.

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SPEAKER_02 45:22

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SPEAKER_01 47:52

Well, I'm currently chasing creepy pasta. I was gonna say creepy spaghetti.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

We should just do a creepy pasta episode, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:01

I know.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

Just like a collection of just little creepy pasta stories. Yeah. We could do creepypasta and like what's the grain of truth in it, you know?

SPEAKER_01 48:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. Maybe every once in a while we should just do a crazy pasta episode, like a reoccurring like every four weeks or something. I don't know. Anyway, I don't know. I'm chasing a creepy pasta if it turns out to be so. Like the story is real, the story's not AI, as far as I'm aware so far. So I just don't know if it'll be long enough, but I think it could be. And do you want any more spoilers than that? I I'll give you one. The setting, the setting creepy, but the setting is a funeral home. Oh, okay. And the funeral home. The person that runs the funeral home is the naughty person.

SPEAKER_03 49:03

Weekend at Bernie's now.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

Um yeah. And I look forward to that. Yeah, so we'll we'll see. We'll see. Just buckle up. We'll see. So, but uh okay, is everyone buckled? Okay, because until then, don't miss a beat. Subscribe or follow Doctoring the Truth wherever you enjoy your podcasts for stories that shock, intrigue, and educate. Because trust, after all, is a delicate thing. You can text us directly on our website at doctoringthe truth at bussprout.com. Email us your own story ideas, medical mishaps, and comments at doctoringthetruth at gmail.com. Holy shit, there's music now, guys. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at DoctoringTheTruth Podcasts and Facebook at Doctoring the Truth. We're on TikTok at Doctoring the Truth and ed oddpod. That's E D A U D P O D. Don't forget to download, rate, and review so we can be sure to bring you more content and crazy, creepy pasta spaghetti stories next week. Until then, stay safe and stay suspicious. Suspicious. Goodbye. LOL. Goodbye.