Justina Pelletier, a teenager from Connecticut, has been kept from her family by the Massachusetts government for 16 months as a battle raged over care for the ill girl. Now she may finally be able to go home.
Justina's family posted a video of her pleas to return to Connecticut. "All I want is to be with my family and my friends back home right now. ... I need to be home with my family. Please let me go home right now
," the 16-year-old said from a wheelchair.
"Through the entire 16 months of this tragedy, the one person we've not heard from publicly is Justina herself. Now we can see her in her own words asking Judge [Johnston] and Governor Patrick for her release
," Rev. Patrick Mahoney, a spokesman for the Pelletier family, said in a statement.
Justina's case gained national prominence in the US over issues of medical child abuse - a syndrome in which parents fake illnesses in children to gain attention - and parental rights, the
Boston Globe reported.
Justina's parents say their daughter suffers from mitochondrial disorder, a rare genetic illness that can cause severe fatigue and intestinal issues. She was being treated by Mark Korson, a metabolic disorders specialist at Tufts Medical Center outside Boston, Mass. She had been a patient there for several years when Dr. Korson told her parents to take Justina to a gastroenterologist at Boston Children's Hospital in February 2013, Slate reported.
But Justina never saw the gastroenterologist, and she never returned home.
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