Liz Klimas
The last time Lou Pelletier spoke with his 15-year-old daughter was Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day. For this father of four, though, the day held a different meaning for his youngest valentine: it was the year anniversary since she had been taken and placed in a psychiatric ward against her parents’ will.
“We need help,” Lou Pelletier told TheBlaze in a one-on-one interview, explaining why he is deciding to talk about the situation and now breaking a gag orde.
“I’m trying to save my daughter’s life,” he continued.
“While still being able to live,” Jessica, one of Justina’s older sisters added.
For more than a year, Justina Pelletier has been the center of a battle between her parents, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and Boston Children’s Hospital, and two controversial medical diagnoses. After her family began speaking out in Nov. 2013 about their fight against these major institutions in court, they were placed under a gag order.
Beyond little snippets given outside court on the many hearings they’ve had, little has been heard from the parents who believe their daughter has mitochondrial disease and the medical facility that says she doesn’t, saying it’s a psychosomatic disorder instead.
But now the Pelletier’s are speaking out.
‘My daughter is about to be kidnapped’
When Pelletiers brought Justina to a Connecticut hospital in December 2012 she was suffering from the flu. As her sister, Jessica explained it, people with mitochondrial disease are affected by illnesses, like the flu, in a more pronounced way.
Jessica, 25 years old and the second oldest of the Pelletier’s daughters, has mitochondrial disease, a disease that can manifest itself in various ways, but at its root results from a defect in the mitochondria, an organelle inside cells that produces energy. Jessica’s diagnosis was established medically through analysis of the cells of her muscle tissue.
In Justina’s case, a doctor evaluated her symptoms, considered her family history — mitochondrial disease can be inherited — and gave her a clinical diagnosis of the disorder. Under the care of physicians at Tufts Medical Center, Justina was treated for mitochondrial disease.
But when she got the flu and her parents were told she should be transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital, things changed.
As Lou Pelletier explained it, Justina was supposed to be transferred via an ambulance, for insurance purposes, to the Boston hospital, brought through the emergency room but seen by a gastrointestinal doctor. Instead, upon arriving, he said she was stopped and evaluated by a neurologist, who, Pelletier said, didn’t look at her medical history or contact her other doctors. This doctor, according to Justina’s father, said he thought the illness was all in Justina’s head — that it was somatoform disorder.
More pictures and articles at link:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/17/ready-jon-father-so-heartbroken-about-daughter-held-at-hospital-against-his-will-he-just-defied-a-judges-order-to-talk-to-us-i-want-to-have-all-my-guns-blazing/
