A 13-year-old cancer patient who was put into foster care after her parents refused to allow her radiation treatment will be reunited with her family, a judge ruled.
Faced with the teenager's deteriorating health, state district Judge Jack Hunter said on Monday that Katie Wernecke would be better off with her family in Corpus Christi than in the custody of the foster parents she was assigned by Child Protective Services (CPS.)
"CPS and the Werneckes are never, ever going to agree," Hunter said. "If I leave it up to CPS and the Werneckes ... this child is going to die for lack of anything being done."
CPS removed Katie from her family after her parents stopped her cancer treatment. Her father, Edward Wernecke, worried that a move to radiation treatment could put his daughter at heightened risk for breast cancer, stunt her growth and cause learning problems.
Before the ruling, Hunter told Wernecke to "look at me man to man, eyeball to eyeball" and promise he would do the best for Katie. Wernecke said he would.
Katie's parents have made several attempts to stop treatment for the girl's Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes. She was diagnosed in January and began receiving chemotherapy, which doctors recommended be followed with radiation.
Katie's oncologist has said her chances of surviving have fallen from 80 percent to about 20 percent because of the incomplete treatment.
State lawyers argued that her life would be endangered if she did not continue treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
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