CARY - Kim Yaman's health and home fell apart together. As bills for 17 doctors mounted over the last three years, cracks ran farther up the walls and thin insulation bled heat in winter.

"I was ashamed to have people come over. I couldn't keep up," Yaman said earlier this month, her mellow Midwestern vowels worn thin by pneumonia.

Yet even as she spoke, the aroma of fresh paint hung in the air, and light glowed through a newly repaired window.

The last contractor had left just an hour earlier, sweeping her deck one last time on his way out.

For 10 weeks, men had sanded hardwood, repaired the roof, fixed windows and patched walls at the small house on Union Street, a few blocks from downtown Cary.

Yaman hoped the massive rehabilitation, organized by the town of Cary with federal money, would be a turning point.

Optimist ringleader

It's simpler for the 51-year-old former writer to print the name of her condition than say it aloud. "Pituitary adenoma with empty sella syndrome and consequent immune deficiency. Leukocytosis with consequent acute anemia," she wrote neatly.

The disease stems from the rare combination of a benign tumor and the unique structure of Yaman's pituitary gland. It shuts down the immune system, almost like AIDS, leaving Yaman vulnerable to illness after illness, including multiple bouts of mononucleosis. Her condition is inoperable but not terminal.

"If I can just keep going until they come up with something - a procedure, a device, some solution - things should look better," Yaman said. "I'm in health-care limbo."

She has sought help since the onset of her symptoms in 2006. But finding optimism, Yaman wrote in her personal blog last year, was sort of like becoming the "ringleader of a destructive cult," a conflicting and confusing task during a "hilarious, crazy personal apocalypse cycle."

Yaman, who is divorced, found it increasingly difficult to work the two jobs she held to make ends meet. She reduced her hours at the Galaxy Cinema, and she was laid off from a job at the Wake County Public School System. Her health insurance was gone.

Her debt soared from zero to $85,000 as doctors' bills topped $600 a month.

She found stop-gap solutions at medical clinics. Doctors would "come running, just to see what I had," Yaman said. She became anemic, her muscles cramped, and she developed asthma.

Meanwhile, even more money was flying out the windows and through the walls.

"How on Earth am I going to be able to afford to heat and cool this house?" asked the mother of two and grandmother of three. "What about my kids?"

Telling her story

The solution, Yaman wants everyone to know, was provided by the town of Cary and the federal Community Development Block Grant program. Yaman, who wrote for alumni magazines for years, knows she makes a decent poster-grandma. "You write a hundred stories, and you only get to tell one," she said.

Her story started early this year with an application to the town's housing rehabilitation program. By fall, hired crews were swarming the house, trading Spanish and English with Yaman. She passed them frozen bottles of Gatorade and played Patsy Cline albums while they brought a surge of momentum to the sometimes-lonely place.

The workers, organized by Unity Three Builders and Firm Foundations Community Services, went beyond their contracts to add extra touches. Their work is everywhere in the house, from the bathroom tiles to the wide living-room windows. Yaman estimates the work will cut her utility bills by $200 a month while preserving the house's value.

As part of the program, she will owe nothing for the work as long as she keeps the house in good repair for five years.

The renovations at Yaman's house were just one of the town's federal housing projects for the year. With federal funds of up to a half-million dollars per year and some of its own money, the town funds home repairs, apartment construction and neighborhood upgrades.

"A big part of it is being able, especially for some of our older community members, to be able to age in place, and to stay independent," said Tracy Stone-Dino, a senior planner for Cary.

The burden

Yaman is a river of anecdotes and colorful words - "noshed," "puckish" - but the question of guilt gives her uncharacteristic pause. The help of her friends and neighbors has come with a burden.

She wants to be the helper and the builder. She wants to be in her other life, volunteering or simply working again, interviewing scientists and military brass and rubbing shoulders with Ted Koppel and Garrison Keillor. But she's not, and for now she can't.

"It's supposed to be the other way around. It's humbling, or even humiliating," she said, her lip curling down.

"I don't feel able to defend my right to deserve this with how useless I am right now."

But her newly beautiful house has given her energy and inspiration. She advocates for safety-net programs, and she says she's going to write again.

Mostly, the care from so many others has become an onus to fight and wait for a cure. She was grateful and confident as her family's Thanksgiving dinner roasted this week.

"It's been a long time since my morale has been high and I've been hopeful about things," she said.