A woman has come back from the dead after her life support machine was turned off and doctors were preparing to remove the donor's organs.
Velma Thomas, 59, had been clinically brain dead for 17 hours after she had a heart attack at her West Virginia home in the US, Good Morning America reported.
She was placed on life support at the local Charleston Area Medical Centre while doctors battled to bring her back to life.
But after her heart stopped three times and she had no detectable brain activity doctors believed she would not survive, so family members and friends said goodbye at her bedside and began planning a funeral.
"Her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up — there was no life there," her son Tim Thomas was quoted as saying in the Charleston Daily Mail.
But 10 minutes after her life support was turned off — while nurses were removing the tubing from the ventilator — she moved her arm, coughed and asked for her son.
Ironically, her request to donate her organs had kept her alive because switching off the ventilator had been delayed to preserve the organs.
She is now expected to make a full recovery, to the surprise of her doctors.
"There are things that as physicians and nurses we can't always explain… I think this is one of those cases," heart specialist Kevin Eggleston said.
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