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A Dead Woman Woke Up Right Before Her Organs Were Harvested
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In 2009, 41-year-old Colleen Burns was not exactly feeling like bottled sunshine and, like most Americans, had crazily unrestricted access to dangerous "prescription" medicine. We shall leave the world's saddest math problem up to you, dear reader.
But as bad as things were, they could always get worse: At some point after Burns' pill overdose, she was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, New York, and declared brain dead. Once given the news, her family agreed to honor Burns' wish to have her organs donated. Well, at least some good could come out of this tragedy.
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Everyone always goes for organ donation. Nobody ever picks the human marionette option.
So what if Burns didn't pass the "Are you sure you're brain dead and not just really lazy" test? So what if, when a nurse scraped the bottom of Burns' foot, Burns' toes curled downward? And so what if Burns' nostrils flared in the hours before she was scheduled to be gutted? Plenty of living corpses we know move around and vaguely react to stimuli; that's how we got both The Walking Dead and The Kardashians.
Despite two huge indications that Colleen Burns wasn't actually brain dead, a nurse dosed her with a sedative (which is odd, because you shouldn't need to sedate a brain-dead person), wheeled her into the operating room, placed her on the operating table, and prepped her for the surgery that would rid her of her pesky life-sustaining organs. It was about that moment that Burns opened her eyes. We sincerely hope she had the presence of mind to point at the nurse and mutter some sinister-sounding gibberish. You just don't get good curse opportunities every day, you know?
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At least curse him with a swarm of taint-devouring crotch-weasels.
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