Ana De La Cruz, a paralyzed Norwalk woman who lost all options for nursing-home care in central Iowa, has died.

De La Cruz’s plight was recently recounted in The Des Moines Register. She’d been a resident of the Fleur Heights Care Center, the last Des Moines area nursing home that accepted patients on ventilators, but found out she couldn’t return there after she was hospitalized in August for an infection. With the Des Moines facility curtailing ventilator-care service, her nearest option for a nursing home would be 90 miles away in Lenox.

De La Cruz died Oct. 10 at Mercy Medical Center. The nursing-home situation wasn’t the main factor, her husband, Rick, said Tuesday. After years of struggle, she decided she no longer wanted doctors to use antibiotics to treat the infection that led to her latest hospitalization.

“She was just so tired, and she was at peace with going home,” Rick De La Cruz said. “We just decided to let her body do what it was going to do.”

He said he was grateful to be at her side when she died at a ventilator-care unit that a national company runs at Mercy. The funeral is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Saturday at Urbandale Baptist Church. Visitation will precede the service, starting at 10:30 a.m. Saturday.

Ana De La Cruz, 41, had been paralyzed from the neck down since 2014, when she had surgery for a non-cancerous tumor on her brain stem. Doctors had warned the couple paralysis was an unlikely but possible complication of the operation, Rick De La Cruz said.

Only a half-dozen Iowa nursing homes accept people on ventilators. Caring for such patients is complicated and expensive, partly because of constant risks of serious infections. Ana De La Cruz had been repeatedly hospitalized for such problems. Her husband said she recently told him several times that she no longer wanted to fight the bacteria. The prospect of having to move to a distant nursing home added another worry, he said, but was not the main reason for her decision.

The couple’s deep Christian faith has been a comfort, Rick De La Cruz said. “We just know that God is in control of all things,” he said. “…I know exactly where she’s at – she’s in heaven.”