ANAHEIM : Hospice Memorial Foundation Created

When Pearl Jemison-Smith was a nurse, she never understood why doctors would order the resuscitation of someone dying from a terminal illness.

“We would never allow someone who was dying to die,” she said, remembering back to the days when she was a nurse caring for those with cancer and other illnesses. “We would beat on their chest and defibrillate them. I felt like I was member of the Gestapo and that I was torturing them.”

It was such scenes that led Jemison-Smith and other Orange County residents recently to create the Hospice Memorial Foundation, which will help pay for hospice care for the terminally ill who cannot afford it. So far, the foundation has helped one man and raised about $28,000.

“Medicare will pay for hospice care, MediCal will pay for hospice care and many insurance companies will also, but there are many people out there who aren’t covered by insurance and fall between the cracks,” said Jemison-Smith, a Garden Grove resident who is the foundation’s president and has long been active in local AIDS-related organizations.

The idea behind hospice care is that the terminally ill are best served when they are allowed to spend their final months out of the hospital and in their own homes surrounded by their families, or at a facility specially designed to reduce their stress and to make them more comfortable.

The philosophy of hospice care does not call for physician-assisted suicide but for allowing nature to take its course, Jemison-Smith said. Drugs are administered to help relieve the patient’s pain. To be eligible for hospice care, patients must have a doctor certify they have less than six months to live.

“Too many people spend the end of their lives with tubes coming out of every orifice,” Jemison-Smith said. “We want to help people live the end of their lives.”

The foundation will also have an educational program, through which people will be taught about hospice care.

The foundation has scheduled an Irvine Medical Center forum, “The Cultural and Religious Aspects of Death and Dying,” for 6 p.m. on Nov. 19. Part of the program will discuss how hospice care, even though it may not be called that, is a part of cultures throughout the world.

“We have become so medically and technically advanced in this country that we no longer accept dying as natural,” Jemison-Smith said. “We teach our doctors that they are to try to save every life, even those lives that can’t be saved.”