A few people have run into this problem, but there are a couple workarounds. If you save before giving the NPC an item, you can reload and try again, until you get it to work (several people have found the problem happens randomly, at least on their system).
Alternately (and probably easier), if you quicksave when the NPC wakes up, then exit the game completely, restart the game and load the quicksave, it should work normally.
