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Terminally-Ill Woman Begs For Death But Parents Fight In Court To Keep Her Alive
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 4, 2012
Modified Oct 4, 2012
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Grace Lee before she fell ill.
By
John Del Signore
Published Oct 4, 2012
Modified Oct 4, 2012
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A terminally-ill woman with brain cancer who's also paralyzed from the neck down is begging her doctors to remove the breathing tube in her throat so that she can die. Officials at the hospital where she's bedridden, Long Island’s North Shore Hospital, say the 28-year-old is mentally competent to make that decision. But her devout mother and father—a prominent Queens pastor at Antioch Missionary Church in Queens—are fighting in court to keep their daughter on life support.
"The thought of her dying, my heart tremors, everything goes black,” Grace Lee’s father, Rev. Manho Lee, told a judge during a recent hearing. And Grace's mother, who worries her daughter will go to hell if she's taken off life-support, tells the Daily News, “Despite all this confusion, she wants to go to heaven. I keep telling her she can get better. God’s going to save you.” The judge ruled against the parents, lifting a restraining order, but the Lees immediately appealed, and another temporary restraining order was put in place.
Before last fall, Grace was a financial manager at Bank of America, living in Manhattan and training to run the New York City Marathon. In September 2011, however, she had a seizure, and doctors discovered the brain tumor. Her deterioration was rapid, and now she tells the News from her hospital bed, "I want to die." And Dr. Dana Lustbader, chief of palliative medicine at North Shore, testified, "She is very tearful when she thinks about dying, but she consistently asks that the breathing tube be removed and she begs us to do that." Read the whole devastating thing here, and if you find a more infuriating story today, please keep it to yourself—we can't handle it.
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brain cancer
grace lee
life support
right to die
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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