Organ donations are a vital part in helping keep some people alive that would otherwise have no chance of survival, yet one woman abruptly woke up to find herself on the verge of having her own body parts harvested away.
You hear the words 'organ harvesting' and immediately your thoughts go to dangerous black market dealings where people wake up with one or several key organs stolen away, or worse if they don't manage to make it that far.
However, donating your organs after death still technically involves a 'harvesting' process, but one woman woke up from a medical emergency to find herself in a process that would have left her without both her organs and her life.
Why were her organs being harvested?
As reported by the Express, Danella Gallegos suffered an unspecificed medical emergency when homeless at the age of 38, and was rushed the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico in a coma.
Doctors communicate to her family that she would never wake up or recover from this horrifying event, effectively ruling her brain dead, and this led her loved ones to allow her organs to be harvested and donated to help other patients in conjunction with New Mexico Donor Services.
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This nonprofit organ procurement organization is a separate entity from the hospital, organizing and leading all cases where a patient is either willing to donate their own organs or requires ones donated by others. It serves over 2 million people across the state of New Mexico.
How did she survive?
Where Danella's story starts to converge into horror though is when both family members and doctors began to notice signs that she might not be as 'unsaveable' as they thought.
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In the days leading up to the organ surgery, her family claim that they saw tears tricking down from her eyes — something the organ donation coordinator dismissed, arguing that it was simply a 'reflex' action.
In addition, her sisters insisted that Danella was moving on the day of the operation, and she was even blinking on command in response to the instructions of a medic in the pre-surgery room.
This caused doctors to attempt to shut down the operation, but the New Mexico Donor Services organ coordinator allegedly continued to urge medical staff to continue on, suggesting that Danella should be supplied morphine to carry out the procedure.
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Those doctors, however, defied these orders and refused to go ahead with the operation, and Danella eventually made a full recovery, effectively grasping life from the jaws of death.
She outlined how 'fortunate' she feels following the horrific event that would have been the end of her life, adding that "it's also crazy to think how close things came to ending differently."
Speaking to the New York Times, staff at the Presbyterian Hospital have claimed that they face increasing pressure from New Mexico Donor Services to carry out surgeries like Danella's regardless of doubts or concerns, although the organization itself has denied these claims.