Jesika Quintal finished her rounds at Caritas Village in downtown Santa Rosa, checking on clients’ health and managing medical paperwork at the hub for families in need of housing and other help.
An eight-year veteran with the Providence Mobile Clinic, the medical assistant exited out the back door and there, coming up the walkway, was Claudia Ledon.
The women have known each other for years, and have weathered unimaginable lows side by side, living in the street.
Quintal, sober for the past nine years, was wrapped immediately in Ledon’s embrace. Emotional, Ledon tells Quintal she’s been clean for a month and that she has an appointment to fix her teeth, which have been ravaged by years of methamphetamine use.
As the women talk, Ledon does not let go of Quintal. It’s as if she releases her, she will let go of whatever magic it is that has brought Quintal up from the depths of homelessness and drug abuse to where she is today, a medical assistant caring for others who are living on the edge.
But Quintal will say it is not magic that delivered her here, it was God.
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Cynthia Sexton sat on the seat of her red walker in the corner of a Petaluma parking lot.
She was talking to another resident of the Studios at Montero permanent supportive housing facility just east of Highway 101.
It was midmorning.
Sexton wore a striped T-shirt and brown tights with a hole in one knee. She had no shoes on her swollen feet.
She smiled broadly as Quintal approached.
Wearing HOKA running shoes and teal medical scrubs with her Providence identification card indicating her role as a medical assistant affixed to her chest, Quintal smiled and greeted Sexton by name.
She asked Sexton about her medications, her persistent sleep troubles and how her new walker was working out. It was Quintal who recently delivered the device to Sexton — a move that proved life-changing for the woman who has long-struggled with mobility.
From the nearby office, Morgan Thomas, a manager at the facility pointed to Sexton and the new walker. Life changing, she said.
“It gave her a new kind of freedom,” she said. “Jesika is amazing.”
Sexton tells Quintal she is running low on medication that helps her sleep.
“I don’t know when my doctor’s appointment is,” Sexton said. “Believe it or not, being a meth addict, I’m an insomniac. I haven’t used meth in a couple of weeks, but I’m sure that will change.”
Quintal stopped what she was doing. Have faith, she told Sexton, and hold firm in her sobriety. You can do this, she said.
Sexton nodded. Quintal told her she’d see her soon and walked across the parking lot to knock on the door of another client.
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Quintal, 45, took a long road to where she is today.
Before she began her career of helping people who are uninsured, unhoused, who are addicted, who struggle with mental illness, Quintal lived that life. She spent years in the throes of addiction. That addiction led her to a life on the street, to stints in jail, to strained relations with loved ones.
But Quintal, through what she describes as an encounter with God, has been drug free for more than nine years. And the last eight years she has worked tirelessly to help vulnerable people such as she once was access health services, including health screenings, vaccinations and preventive care.
For most jobs, a long history of drug use, homelessness and petty crime that resulted jail time would be deal breakers. But for the people running the Providence mobile health clinic, Quintal’s life experience, and her recovery, were assets.
“She did tell us her background in the interview,” said Jen Eid-Ammons, family nurse practitioner and veteran with the mobile clinic. “I remember she was telling us her story, unprompted, maybe after we had said, ‘What is your interest in the mobile health clinic?’”
Quintal had a ready answer.
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Quintal started smoking pot and cigarettes at 13 or 14. She drank, too.
Her father had been in prison for nearly all of her earliest years. He got out when she was 10. Addiction — both of her parents used — was a fact of life in her Sonoma home growing up.
“They never used in front of me, but it was obvious what they were doing,” she said.
She dropped out of Sonoma Valley High School a week into her freshman year. She continued to drink and dabble in drugs.
“One thing about my parents that I have always known is that they love me very much,” she said. “I was never abused, I was never mistreated. We always had a house, there was always food on the table.”
Through everything that followed, her family remained.
“To this day, I have an amazing relationship with them.”
Love was ever present. But, so too, was addiction and its fallout.
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Back at Caritas Village, the family shelter and services hub operated by Catholic Charities in downtown Santa Rosa, Quintal hadn’t yet reached the front door when a man approached her, calling out “Hey, Doc.”
Quintal is not a doctor. She is not a nurse. As a medical assistant, she is trained to administer vaccinations, check cholesterol and blood sugar, give strep throat and pregnancy tests, and check for urinary tract infections among other things.
She also helps clients make and keep doctors’ appointments, sometimes arranging bus trips or Lyft and Uber rides. She helps clients procure medical equipment like walkers and oxygen tanks. She assists with health screenings and education on things like nutrition and healthy choices.
She gets on the phone with providers to help answer clients’ questions.
She encourages clients to enter the medical system for preventive care so they will stay healthier and stay out of the emergency room.
A deeply personal understanding of the struggles people with housing insecurity helps Quintal break down barriers that would stop most clients from seeking care.
Quintal and her colleagues on the Providence mobile unit team — two nurses, a community health worker and a fellow medical assistant — crisscross Sonoma County each week, visiting about 18 permanent supportive housing, shelter facilities and other community hubs.
On this day, after stops at the Studios at Montero in Petaluma and Santa Rosa’s Caritas Village, she spent time at The Commons, a permanent supportive housing operation on Mendocino Avenue, and Sam Jones Hall, the county’s largest homeless shelter in southwest Santa Rosa.
She has a list of her regular clients, but still more people approach her with questions and concerns: Why haven’t I received my prescription meds? Is this wound infected?
If a client is not a Providence patient but insured elsewhere, Quintal will offer assistance while also helping to link the client to their primary caregiver. If a client is uninsured, Quintal will bring them into the system to receive care.
The focus is to offer care that will help clients, no matter their health care provider, avoid the emergency room and its associated expenses.
“We are trying to bridge the gap, ease the way,” she said. “We are not in competition with anyone. We all want to help people.”
On this morning, the man who called to Quintal outside of Caritas Village saw her teal scrubs and Providence ID card. While not a Providence patient, he needed a letter from his medical provider documenting a recent surgery so that he could extend his stay at Sam Jones Hall.
Quintal got his name and some information. She was on it, she told him.
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Quintal was 17, maybe 18, when she moved from drinking and pot smoking to harder drugs.
At the same time, she began studying to get her GED. She worked at a local grocery store in Sonoma. First as a courtesy clerk, then in the deli and the floral department. But she was also smoking, drinking and doing “a lot of cocaine.”
She was 19 when she discovered meth. That changed everything.
There were arrests, misdemeanors, for possession of a controlled substance. Later, possession of marijuana while driving. Later still, possession of drug paraphernalia. And shoplifting.
She rarely showed up to court. Fees piled up. Bench warrants were issued.
There were stints in jail. One time, as long as a month.
By that time, Quintal’s dad had gotten clean for good. He wanted the same for his daughter. But he was tough.
“My dad, he never bailed me out. He let me sit there. Looking back, I see why,” she said. “He would come to my court dates and literally tell the judge, ‘She’s going to tell you everything you want to hear, and she’s not going to do any of it.’”
So Quintal continued to use, to lose jobs, to hurt loved ones.
Amid all of that, she married.
At some point, she went to a 28-day rehab program. She left after five days.
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“She’s in the right business,” Kimberly Jo Smith said. “It’s not just words.”
Smith stays at the Studios at Montero in Petaluma, where she is a caregiver for a small list of residents. She, too, has for years struggled with homelessness. She’s on a waiting list for a tiny house at People’s Village at the Mary Isaak Center in Petaluma.
On this day, she chatted with Quintal, who was making her rounds.
Smith recalled first laying eyes on Quintal back at a community service event.
“I was kind of jealous,” she said, laughing. “People were like ‘Jesika! Jesika!’ How is this person so popular?”
Smith soon saw Quintal’s gifts on display.
Quintal is good at what she does because she has lived it.
“People don’t want to go to the doctor because of the trust factor and the fear factor. She has broken those barriers,” Smith said. “I have seen so many times, people were not getting care, just ‘F**k doctors.’ I was the same way, ‘F**k the dentist.’ But no, no, no she comes and she connects with people.”
“She and Jennifer and Juanita, it’s a gift to be around them,” Smith said of the Providence team. “They are there for the right reasons. The results they get? Putting out fires before they start?”
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It was a 30-day stint in jail followed by a mandatory stay in rehab that gave Quintal her first real taste of sobriety in years.
She started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She had, by her guess, about 15 months clean. But she got “complacent.”
She slipped.
When she started using again, Quintal’s relationship with her husband was more than strained. They were separated but still, in her words, “hooked up.”
She got pregnant. But when she understood she was pregnant, she got clean.
Her daughter, Hannah, was born in April 2006.
Quintal was drug free. Hannah was healthy. Quintal was happy.
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In her visit at Sam Jones Hall, Quintal was checking in with people when a staffer asked her to look in on a man suffering from massive, oozing blisters.
The 33-year-old man, speaking barely above a whisper, told Quintal he got the sores during what he called “a long walk.” Military-style boots sat under his cot.
Quintal snapped a photo of the man’s feet and asked her team what kind of care they suggested. In the meantime, she helped sift through the man’s box of personal belongings to find his issued bandages and ointment. Medical paperwork was crumpled between the bandages, a collared dress shirt and a white T-shirt.
The man was unclear about his follow-up care.
Quintal got on the phone with his provider — not Providence. Quintal, with the man’s permission, sought answers about his care plan and appointments.
After the call, she gave the man instructions for his next two appointments. She arranged transportation. She let shelter staff know about the appointments.
“I know how to navigate the system,” she said. “It eliminates barriers.”
Leaving Sam Jones Hall, Quintal then passed a man standing in the corner of the recreation room. It’s the same man she saw that morning outside Caritas Village, the one who hailed her with “Hey, Doc” and the request for a letter that would allow him to keep his shelter spot.
Now, just a few hours later, it’s clear whatever Quintal did on his behalf worked. He’s here.
From across the room, the man raised his hand and touched the brim of his hat — a gesture of respect. Of thanks.
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Quintal started using again when Hannah was about 2 years old.
Back together with her husband, he gave her an ultimatum. Quintal balked. She took her baby and went to her parents’ house.
But that didn’t stabilize her.
“I started going out a little more, staying out a little bit later, until it got to the point where I just didn’t come back,” she said.
Her parents were worried — for her, yes, but more for their granddaughter.
They asked Quintal to sign papers giving them guardianship of Hannah.
“My dad has always been one of my biggest supporters. He said, ‘Look, here’s the thing, if you get in serious trouble and CPS is involved, I need to make sure Hannah is safe and that is always my number one priority,’” he said. “He said, ‘I don’t want to take you to court, but I will.’”
“So I signed it,” Quintal said.
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Time and time again, year after year, Jennielynn Holmes has seen Quintal and the rest of the Providence mobile health team get results for Sonoma County’s most vulnerable populations.
“They are one of the few people who bring health care to where the people are,” said Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities of Northwest California. “That is a shift in a lot of ways of thinking.”
During the pandemic, when the first vaccines were released, the team advocated that people experiencing homelessness have immediate access.
“They brought them to the streets,” Holmes said.
Launched in 1991 by the Sisters of St. Joseph Orange, the order of nuns that helped build Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the mobile clinic operations — labs, tests, staff time — are funded by health care giant Providence, which operates Memorial Hospital and hospitals in Healdsburg and Petaluma. Philanthropy dollars pay for nearly everything else used by patients, including glucose monitors, oxygen tanks and blood pressure cuffs.
The Providence team is one of several similar mobile operations that span Sonoma County, assisting vulnerable populations who struggle with health problems and mental health issues.
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Quintal shared a story about a Christmas Day when Hannah was maybe 6. The family was waiting for Quintal to arrive. Hours passed.
“I don’t think I showed up until like 7 o’clock that night and she had waited to open her presents,” she said. “She didn’t even open a single present because she wanted me there. What 6-year-old does that?”
Quintal’s voice breaks as she tells the story. But back then, she could not shake drugs.
“When you are actively in addiction, it’s a very self-centered disease,” she said. “All I cared about was me. I mean, I loved my daughter, but I loved drugs, I loved getting high. As Christians call it, I loved my flesh.”
Still deeply addicted, Quintal got pregnant again.
This time she didn’t get clean. This time she made the decision to give the baby up for adoption.
After giving birth, Quintal refused to hold her baby and walked out of the hospital against doctors’ advice and plunged into years of self-abuse and homelessness.
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Hannah Alvarez, now a sophomore in the early childhood studies program at Sonoma State University, remembers praying for her mom. Always praying. And the prayer was always the same: God, bring my mom home.
“I was aware that she was on drugs and that she was living under a bridge,” she said. But still, her prayers remained the same: God, bring my mom home.
From a young age, she describes her grandparents instilling in her the notion of grace and forgiveness, especially when it came to her mom.
“They never talked down about her, they never made me think, ‘Oh you don’t need your mom,’” she said. “It was like, ‘This is what your mom is doing. She is choosing this right now but we still love her.’”
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In September 2016, law enforcement officials sent a letter to Quintal’s parents’ house, indicating there was video footage of her stealing from a grocery store.
Her parents tried to intervene again.
“I got a text from my dad, ‘We love you, we miss you and we’d really like it if you’d come home,’” she said.
So she rode her bike home, to the house on Arroyo Way just south of Sonoma Valley Hospital. She did little besides eat and sleep as she weened herself free of drugs.
Still, despite having her first drug-free days in years, despair followed her.
“I remember thinking ‘Why do I feel so empty? Why am I so hopeless?’” she said.
She’d been clean about 10 days when she says she was compelled to walk into the backyard of her parents’ home and fall to her knees. She describes what happened as “an encounter with God.”
“Whatever you’ve got is better than what I’m doing and I’m willing to do whatever I need to do not to feel this way and not to live this way,” she said, recalling the moment. “The only way I can describe it is like somebody poured water on me and all this dirty, filthy motor oil … came off. All the guilt and shame and fear and anxiety and the desire to use … was gone.”
“From that point forward, I never had a desire to use again,” she said. “None of the things I spent 23 years doing, did I ever have the desire to do again.
“Nothing. Delivered. Set free in a moment.”
…
Quintal enrolled at Empire College. Hannah helped her with essay formatting and watched her mom study.
In 2018, two weeks after she graduated with a medical assistant degree from Empire College, a family member told Quintal that a position was opening up on the Providence Mobile Clinic team — the same giant RV she’d seen while riding her bike around Sonoma. The job that had intrigued even at her lowest.
The crew there has worked decades together. Openings are exceedingly rare.
Still, Quintal hoped she brought something different to the job.
The people at Providence agreed.
“For us, in that interview moment, you believe in second chances,” Eid-Ammons said. “We are out here to care for the vulnerable and those who are struggling. It was not at all a deal breaker, it was more ‘We believe in you.’”
Quintal started in July 2018. She proved her worth immediately.
When the team would walk the Joe Rodota Trail in Santa Rosa or other places that have a high concentration of homeless encampments, Quintal knew names, she knew faces, she asked after loved ones.
“I was just blown away,” Eid-Ammons said. “By having those connections with them, they don’t feel invisible anymore. That goes away, there is connection and there is healing. They just know Jesika is going to take care of things.”
Quintal and her fellow medical assistant are “little angels,” Eid-Ammons said.
“They have so many saves every day,” she said. “I think about everything they do. They are everywhere and they make saves every day.”
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At a Wednesday evening service at Sonoma Lighthouse Christian Church, Quintal was in the front row. When the band played, she stood and put her hands in the air. The tempo picked up and she bounced on her toes.
Pastor Sebastian Hernandez told the congregation, “The struggle is real. I do not have to live the way I used to live.”
Quintal raised a hand high above her head.
After that pivotal day in September 2016, Quintal threw herself into church and her faith.
“There is hope, and I find that hope in Jesus,” she said. “I want to see other people experience the freedom I have experienced. I want them to know.”
Fluent in Spanish, she assists with multiple services a week — kids church, Spanish language programming, single adult ministry.
“She’s kind of a hero around here, I just want you to know,” Pastor Steven Reyes said.
In sharing her story, Quintal holds nothing back. That would defeat the purpose, her purpose.
“I’ve never been ashamed of what God brought me out of and I never will be,” she said. “It’s been a tool that I have been able to use to connect with people on the street. I know how they feel because I’ve been there.”
There is redemption in her work, too.
“I know the people I have hurt, including myself,” she said. “I know the level that I resorted to to get what I wanted. I am super aware of everything that Jesus has saved me from. In that place I have a lot of compassion for people. I don’t ever forget where I came from. Ever.”
You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.
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