Clinic for Poor Answers Prayers

Sister Marie Therese and “a group of ladies came together to pray” nearly a decade ago, but the Roman Catholic nun recalls that they “soon realized that prayer without good works was dead.”

Their desire to combine meditation with action resulted in the opening in 1979 of the Lestonnac Free Clinic in Orange to serve the poor--particularly indigent Latinos living in central Orange County. Sister Marie Therese, now the clinic’s executive director, remembers that she and her supporters initially envisioned nothing more than a “little clinic to treat cut fingers, running noses and minor ailments like that. God thought otherwise.”

Today the Lestonnac Free Clinic has evolved into a full-service medical facility where more than 3,000 patients annually are treated free of charge by a volunteer staff of 50 doctors and 25 nurses.

Unlike most other free clinics, which because of budget constraints are limited to providing only basic medical care, Lestonnac Clinic is able to treat patients with complicated illnesses, board of directors President Jerry Derloshon said, because of its affiliations with area hospitals and its volunteer roster of surgeons, anesthesiologists and ophthalmolgists.

St. Jude Hospital & Rehabilitation Center in Fullerton provides free X-rays and laboratory services for children, Sister Marie Therese said. St. Joseph Hospital in Orange provides similar services for adults and has set aside a bed for the free care of Lestonnac patients requiring hospitalization.

Under the clinic’s “Stork Plan,” Santa Ana Hospital Medical Center delivers babies of Lestonnac patients for $750, less than half the usual fee, said Dr. Charles Turner, a general practitioner who provides prenatal care at the clinic. And specialists have performed brain, cataract, cancer and other complicated operations at no charge, Sister Marie Therese added.

$70,000 Yearly Budget

All of this is done on a budget of $70,000 a year because Sister Marie Therese has an uncanny ability to cajole and coax free services from doctors, nurses and hospitals, Derloshon said.

“Contrary to Sister Marie Therese’s physically frail appearance, she is the energizing force behind the clinic,” said Derloshon, a marketing and public relations consultant for Chapman College in Orange. “She is a very charismatic woman who almost single-handedly convinced medical specialists and hospitals to affiliate with the clinic.

“One day a man had a flat tire in front of the clinic, and he came in to use the phone to call his auto club,” Derloshon recalled while explaining Sister Marie Therese’s persuasive abilities. “After he made his call, he looked around the waiting room and asked what was going on. It turned out that he was a doctor and before he left, Sister Marie Therese had signed him up as a volunteer physician.”

Taught Music

Yet as Sister Marie Therese tells it, this is a role into which she was thrust by accident. Indeed, Sister Marie Therese said that she was quite content teaching French and music at St. Jeanne de Lestonnac Catholic School in Tustin, which serves students from preschool through eighth grade. About 10 years ago she began having weekly conversations at the school with a woman from France who was living in Orange County and wanted to improve her English.

“I enjoyed being able to talk to someone in French because I’d lived in (largely French-speaking) Belgium for a year,” Sister Marie Therese said. “We started speaking of spiritual things, and soon we were joined by a group of ladies who came together to pray.”

These women became the nucleus of the Lestonnac Guild.

In the fall of 1977, Sister Marie Therese and this group of women held fund-raisers to provide food baskets to the poor at Thanksgiving and Christmas. While delivering the food baskets, the women were shocked by the deprivation of the people they visited, particularly the lack of health care being provided to illegal aliens from Mexico living in central Orange County. Many of these people lived in garages or shared tiny apartments with one or two other families.

‘Poor People Suffering’

“We saw poor people suffering so much,” said Sister Marie Therese, describing women giving birth to children in garages because they couldn’t afford anything else. “In El Modena (a predominately Latino neighborhood on the eastern edge of Orange) we saw hungry, suffering children without any money to go to a doctor.

“Pregnant mothers did not know where they were going to have their babies delivered because they couldn’t afford hospitals. There were so many people in dire need of help. We thought we’d help these poor people by opening a little clinic.”

The clinic was named after St. Jeanne de Lestonnac, the 16th-Century French nun who founded the sisters of the Company of Mary, of which Sister Marie Therese is a member.

“People ask us, like they asked us back in 1978 when we were raising money to open the clinic, why a free clinic is even needed,” Sister Marie Therese said. “People ask why don’t the poor go to a public hospital? Well, there’s no public hospital in Orange County.”

(UCI Medical Center in Orange, formerly a county-run hospital for the poor, is the ewest of the University of California’s five teaching hospitals and is attempting to shed its image as a dumping ground for other hospitals that do not want to treat the indigent. )”We treat the poorest of the poor. We don’t take patients who have Medi-Cal, Medicare or (private) insurance. We treat only people with no money because they’re out of work or who can’t get Medicare or Medi-Cal because they’re (illegal migrant) workers.”

Equally important as the medical care, Sister Marie Therese said, is that “the Lestonnac Clinic likes to make people feel that somebody cares. People feel abandoned; we give them love.

“If people feel good, they will be good to their children, neighbors and others. We even have a psychologist for people to talk to, and next month we’ll have a psychiatrist available.”

‘A Healthier Place’

Sister Marie Therese said: “The clinic makes Orange County a healthier place to live in because we stop the spread of disease. The other day a man came in, and we found out he was suffering from tuberculosis. If we hadn’t been here to treat him, he’d still be walking around spreading TB.”

The clinic officially is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. “But yesterday we stayed till 5 because there were so many people,” Sister Marie Therese said during a recent interview.

Sitting in an examining room waiting to be examined by Dr. Charles Turner was a 32-year-old man from Orange whose right leg was infected, swollen and throbbing with pain. He declined to give his name because he is a migrant worker from Mexico who has been in the United States illegally for six weeks.

With volunteer receptionist Thelma Baca serving as interpreter, the man said that eight days before, while working as a laborer helping to demolish a house, he cut his leg. Initially, he dismissed it as a minor wound, but when it failed to heal, he became concerned and wanted medical attention.

Left With a Smile

He couldn’t afford a doctor and didn’t know where he’d go for medical care until friends recommended the Lestonnac Clinic. Following his examination by Turner, he left with a relieved smile and a prescription for medication to treat his infected leg.

The financial backing that made the man’s treatment possible is due in large measure to the work of the clinic’s 20-member support group, the Lestonnac Guild, who embarked on a fund-raising drive in early 1978 to open a free clinic.

The women held fund-raising lunches, fashion shows and garage sales, Sister Marie Therese said, raising $10,000, enough to open the clinic in January, 1979. When the clinic opened its doors, it had only one suite in an Orange office building. It now has expanded to two adjacent suites that are divided into a small office for Sister Marie Therese, a large waiting room for patients, a nurses’ station and a maze of examining rooms for patients.

Charitable Grants

Over the past six years, the clinic has won a series of highly competitive charitable grants from Orange County businesses. Last year the clinic began receiving a county grant that covers the $880 monthly rent, Sister Marie Therese said.

The largest single contribution came last April when the Irvine Co., the county’s largest landowner, made a $50,000 donation, Sister Marie Therese said. Three months later, Lestonnac held its first fund-raising dinner at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers.

The June event, co-chaired by Carl’s Jr. founder and board Chairman Carl Karcher, Fluor Corp. Vice President Bob Fluor II, Orange County Supervisor Ralph Clark and the Most Rev. Thomas Clavel, head of Orange County’s Catholic Hispanic Ministries, netted more than $20,000, Sister Marie Therese said.

(Those wishing to donate money or services to the clinic, which now is looking for larger quarters, may call (714) 633-4600.)

‘This Is God’s Clinic’

Sister Marie Therese was quick to point out that she has no background in nursing or administration, and she dismissed her role in the clinic, noting: “We’ve overcome obstacles because this is God’s clinic.”

During the several hours a visitor recently spent at the clinic, the only time Sister Marie Therese drew any attention to herself was when she pointed out a framed photograph of Pope John Paul II that she received last year on which the pontiff wrote: “To Sister Marie Therese in appreciation of her work for the poor.”

Sister Marie Therese is very reticent in providing information about herself: What’s important, she said, is the clinic and its work. Declining to give her age, Sister Marie Therese said she was born on the West Indies island of Trinidad, was educated and trained at a convent in England and after World War II served as a missionary, first in the Belgian Congo and later in Brazil.

Served as Missionary

In 1965, Sister Marie Therese came to the U.S., serving first as a missionary in Fresno and then as a teacher at Tustin’s St. Jeanne de Lestonnac Catholic School.

When the clinic first opened, she divided her time between her teaching duties at St. Jeanne’s and the clinic. Four years ago, she started working full time at the clinic. In 1983, she moved to El Modena so she could live among the poor she serves and be within five minutes walking distance of the clinic, which on its two busiest days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, often has patients overflowing the waiting room and spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Wednesdays are set aside primarily for the treatment of obstetrics and gynecology patients. Each Wednesday, Turner is at the clinic; the other Lestonnac doctors volunteer their services at the clinic once or twice a month, Sister Marie Therese said. Since establishing a general practice in Santa Ana in 1953, Turner, 60, said he has delivered more than 16,000 babies.

‘A Good Place’

On a recent Wednesday morning, Turner was conducting a prenatal checkup of Christina Quintero, an Orange resident who is five-months’ pregnant. As Turner used a fetal scope to check the baby’s heart beat, Quintero explained she had opted for prenatal care at Lestonnac because “I heard this was a good place to come.”

When Quintero was pregnant with her first child four years ago, she said she underwent prenatal care and delivery of her son, Evirista, at UCI Medical Center in Orange. Her treatment at the center cost $2,000, which she said was “more than I could really afford.”

Since she and her husband couldn’t pay the $2,000 in full, the center allowed a $300 down-payment and installment payments of $35 a month. “I still owe $500,” she said.

Quintero is now separated from her husband and must rely solely on her modest wages from her work cleaning houses to support herself and her son. She said she can’t afford to be treated for her second pregnancy at UCI Medical Center.

Avoided $25 Charge

By coming to Lestonnac, Quintero was able to avoid the $25 charge that Turner said he would charge a patient in his private practice for a routine prenatal exam. Turner added that Quintero qualifies for Lestonnac’s “Stork Plan.”

“Most of our patients can pay this $750 (under the plan), whether from their own savings or by borrowing from family and friends,” Turner said.

One of the registered nurses assisting Turner was Susan Sepulveda, 34, an Orange resident employed at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange who has volunteered her services at Lestonnac once a month for the past year.

Explaining why she is a Lestonnac volunteer, Sepulveda said: “There are so many underprivileged people, especially in this area of Orange, who have no place else to go. It makes me feel better that I am doing something worthwhile.”

Echoing this view, Cecelia Borrowe, 45, a nurse from Placentia, said she has been volunteering once a month at Lestonnac for the past two years because “providing proper health care is important, not only to the people receiving treatment but also to the larger community because we are preventing the spread of illnesses and diseases.”

Best, Worst Times

Turner, who has been a Lestonnac volunteer for three years, also fills in when other doctors are unable to fulfill their commitments to work at the clinic. This has given him an opportunity to observe the clinic at both the best and worst of times. He said he continues to be amazed at the quality of care received by Lestonnac patients. He said the care is comparable to that provided by private practice physicians.

Citing a case demonstrating the speed and accuracy of the diagnosis and treatment of Lestonnac patients, Turner recalled one morning when a 42-year-old man came into the clinic suffering severe abdominal pain. After examining the patient, Turner tentatively concluded the man was suffering appendicitis.

Turner sent the man to St. Joseph Hospital for further tests to complete the diagnosis. Rather than suffering from appendicitis, it was discovered that afternoon at St. Joseph that the patient had cancer of the colon.

Free Care

Two days later the patient underwent successful surgery at St. Joseph. The surgery, which Turner said normally would have cost the patient a minimum of $10,000, cost the man nothing because it was performed by St. Joseph-affiliated doctors who had volunteered their services to Lestonnac. The man recuperated in the bed St. Joseph has set aside for Lestonnac patients.

The same day the cancer victim walked into the clinic, Turner said, a 52-year-old woman came to Lestonnac with a lump in her breast. It was diagnosed as cancer, and she underwent successful breast cancer surgery a week later.

“Seeing two patients for the first time on a Wednesday, having them correctly diagnosed as having cancer and having them both operated on within a week is something that can’t be done in the private sector,” Turner said. “We were able to pull this off here only because of the very close cooperation between the clinic and St. Joseph Hospital.”