Recession and Illness Team to Ruin Family : Health nightmare: Ailing Boston woman, whose mother died of cancer, tells the horror of suffering a decline from well-being to total disaster.

Life has touched Gwendolyn Stephens for the worst.

Her mother was seriously injured in a car accident, and then succumbed to lung cancer. She herself was forced to quit her job because of colitis and high blood pressure--and then she found she had breast cancer.

But there is one more cross that Stephens, a minister and mother of seven, must bear. Her family is without health insurance. And that--coupled with the effects of a wretched economy--has pushed her deeply into the red.

Stephens’ family owes thousands of dollars. Her table is set with food stamps. Her children are unable to nurture their artistic talents in college.

She has had to endure all this and outpatient chemotherapy, too. “One of my bum weeks again,” she said. “I’ve been very nauseous and my head aches.”

But she retains her faith.

“I still have life. I can still sing. I can still do my poetry. We don’t feel poor. We have a great deal of love for one another and we have Christ in our lives,” she said.

In 1987, Stephens’ mother, Adell Collins, was seriously injured in an auto accident. The car in which Collins was riding was not fully covered by insurance. The other car had none.

Collins suffered a broken hip, a severe concussion, congestive heart failure and permanent nerve and muscle damage.

Stephens said her mother went through about $150,000 for medical expenses not covered by liability insurance or by Medicare, federal health insurance for the elderly. The lifetime savings were to have been Collins’ legacy to her four daughters.

Stephens said she would have received $37,500 as her share, money she had planned to use for her children’s college education. Instead, she said, she owes a lot of people money.

“Close to $100,000,” she said, “bills that we’re behind in, what I owe my son’s college, what I owe my mother’s attorney.”

Her mother required so much care, Stephens said, that the expenses were eating away the money she earned as a YWCA education counselor. “The money earned was not comparable to that coming out,” she said. “I was taking it out in buckets and replacing it with thimbles.”

“We were responsible for hospital bills and medication. She had to have around-the-clock nurses for a year and a half, and then a live-in nurse after that,” she said.

Stephens and Collins lost their homes and were forced into the streets for six months in 1990. Stephens and her children separated, living with relatives, friends, in cars and at a homeless shelter.

It wasn’t always that way. Stephens was born into an affluent family. Her father was a general cleaning contractor. Her mother was a nurse. Both parents were ministers. “I knew nothing about going without,” she said.

But as the economic times soured, so did her life. She separated a year ago from her unemployed husband, who remodeled homes.

“The economy caused a lot of problems,” she said. “The fact that he was out of work for about three years. Then there was some personal problems. The fact he wasn’t working and then I was working made him feel useless.

“Later on, I was out of work. The emotional pressure trying to make ends meet, trying to remain a family in the midst of the turmoil was too much. Tempers started to flare.”

Then, two years ago, Adell Collins was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her condition worsened this year and, for 4 1/2 months, she lay attached to suction tubes and oxygen lifelines, moaning.

On a lovely day in June, when, as the Song of Solomon proclaims, the flowers bloom in the earth and the time of the singing of birds is come, Stephens made one of her frequent visits to her mother’s bedside.

“Let go of the rope,” the 73-year-old woman said, imploring her daughter to let her go. “I’m going home in two days.”

“You are.”

“Yes, and I’m going to walk.”

To heaven, she meant. She hadn’t walked in months on this Earth.

Two nights later, she went to sleep and never woke up. Collins, who worked hard all her life starting as a little girl picking cotton in her native South Carolina, died penniless.

Stephens, 41, soldiers on--despite the large lump she discovered in her left breast last November, which led to a partial mastectomy in January.

“They told me with the chemotherapy and radiation, that could add five years to my life, or more,” she said.

She survives on government assistance--close to $1,000 a month, food stamps, Medicaid. But the welfare payments barely cover her rent of $800 a month. Her church and friends help.

It’s hard on the kids. “They can’t take anymore,” she said.

Her oldest son, Michael, 21, an award-winning artist, dropped out of the Savannah College of Art and Design last summer to help care for his grandmother and his 5-year-old brother, Jerome.

Michael looked for work but found nothing until May. Even then, it was a low-paying, a part-time job as a clerk at a Radio Shack store.

Shortly after Stephens was diagnosed with cancer, her 19-year-old son, Mark, was laid off from his job with New England Telephone. His dream of school and becoming a paralegal faded.

“I felt bad because I wanted to help out the family,” he said.

For Stephens, the physical pain is not the only misery she endures. She is guilt-ridden that she cannot give her children more, like college educations and like the $40 bicycle that Jerome wanted.

But she is undaunted.

“Everything we lost, we know we’re going to get back. And more,” she said.