Justina Pelletier from Connecticut, US has finally returned home, after she was forced to stay in hospital for 16-months.
Justina’s parents finally won custody of their daughter on Tuesday, after she was held in a secure unit in Boston Children’s Hospital.
The 16-year-old girl expressed her excitement to be returning home after missing all of that time from school and her friends.
“I’m so happy. I’m so excited.”
Justina suffers from a rare muscle disease called Mitochondrial Disease. Back in February 2013 Justina came down with a bad dose of the flu, and with her regular doctor away at the time, her family decided to take their wheelchair bond daughter to the Boston hospital as a precaution.
Once Justina was admitted to hospital, doctors re-diagnosed her, saying she had Somatoform Disorder, a stress-related mental illness.
When her parents protested against the diagnosis, doctors called on social welfare who then allowed the hospital to have custody of their daughter.
What then began was a long custody battle for Lou and Linda Pelletier - who were only allowed to see their daughter once a week, while she was locked in a psychiatric ward for the rest of time.
Both Lou and Linda were happy with the court’s decision, but still are upset over their daughter’s treatment.
“I am still very angry at the psychiatrists, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Families and Children for putting Justina through this. They are sadists and psychiatry is the devil as far as I am concerned. My daughter was used as a lab rat, a cruel experiment. Now they need other lab rats – well they’ll struggle. We finally beat the system and they cannot do that to anyone else."
They revealed that Justina’s return home celebrations will be low-key but her sisters still plan to celebrate the occasion.
“She needs time to adjust to being home and I think she wants that to be low key. We need to help her back to health. She has been sleep deprived – forced to get up at 7am every morning and not takes the naps she needs – and I think she just wants to settle back into her old bedroom.”
