A terminally ill Queens woman who won a court battle against her parents to allow a hospital to disconnect a breathing tube has decided that she wants to live out the rest of her life, the woman's lawyer said Saturday.
That decision represents a striking change in direction for SungEun Grace Lee, 28, a bank financial manager who is now paralyzed from the neck down and forced to communicate by blinking — once for yes, twice for no — or by mouthing words.
On Friday, a four-judge appellate court panel upheld a lower-court ruling that she was mentally capable of making decisions about her own care, handing a defeat to her parents, who argued that her medicated state had made her incompetent.
Her lawyer, David A. Smith, said that Ms. Lee told him of her decision from her hospital bed Saturday morning and said that she had given her father, the Rev. Man Ho Lee, a pastor in a Korean church in Flushing, Queens, the proxy right to make health care decisions should she become incapacitated.
For more than a week, Mr. Smith and her doctors at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset on Long Island had contended that she could no longer bear to live on life support and wanted to be allowed to die. Her parents said that she was being pressured by doctors who were able to influence her because she was heavily medicated.
Of Ms. Lee's apparent change of heart, Mr. Smith said: "When I asked her if she's doing this to make peace with her parents, she told me she was doing it to make peace with her parents and to make peace with God."
A North Shore spokesman, Terry Lynam, said the hospital would honor her wishes, "whatever they may be."
Her parents could not immediately be reached for comment, and her brother, Paul Lee, did not immediately respond to an e-mail about the developments.
Ethicists said it was unusual for a life-support case in which the patient was conscious to become so acrimonious.
"I think in other cultures the locus of decision-making is more with the family than the patient," said Dr. J. Randall Curtis, director of the palliative care center at University of Washington.
"It's not terribly unusual in our increasingly multicultural society to have this clash, where Western-trained clinicians really view the patient as the sole determinant of all decision-making and the family sees it different."
Dr. Curtis said at least one famous study of seriously ill patients found that even in the West most defer to relatives in a conflict over their treatment.
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