12/28/2006
Sickness Leads to Financial Crisis and a New Direction
By KARI HASKELL

There is a constellation of dime-size brown spots on the lower half of Katasha Green's legs. The spots reflect how her illness is weakening her body, she said. At only 28, she has sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease primarily of the lungs and lymph glands that she developed after working for years in filth and grime.

Ms. Green became a boiler mechanic when she was 19. As a caretaker of radiators and water heaters for New York City Housing Authority buildings, she went to work at 5 a.m. and often stayed for 18 hours.

She would sometimes remove dead pigeons from rooftop water tanks. In basements, she wriggled into crawl spaces to clear pipes and repair and maintain boilers. She had to use chemical solvents to remove grime. It was all in a day's dirty work, for which she earned $36,000 a year plus benefits. She could afford to pay $574 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in East New York, Brooklyn, where she lives with her two sons, Khaaliq Ford, 9, and Kazeer Williams, 3.

Then, two years ago, the symptoms of her disease began with a cough that escalated into shortness of breath. She thought it was asthma or bronchitis, but then she heard a pop in her ribs. The sound scared her enough to make her go to the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital Center in February 2005. She spent a month in the hospital. It was not until a pulmonary doctor told her to transfer to Mount Sinai Hospital that she learned what she had.

"With one test, they found out," she said.

It was a relief. At least now, she knew she was not going to die from her illness. Her sons would not be orphans. She was put on steroids to treat the symptoms and gained more than 100 pounds, which she is slowly losing since going off the medication.

After eight months on disability, she was ready to go back to work. In October 2005, she sought a transfer from the boiler mechanic's job to a position that did not require working in harsh places. She was told she could apply for such jobs when they came open, but could not be automatically transferred.

Feeling her situation was an emergency, she approached her union representative to intervene. She also wrote letters to her councilman and to the mayor. All of her inquiries received a similar response.

She had no choice but return to her position, and by December 2005, she had a relapse.

"I couldn't breathe," she said. "I was very sick dealing with the soot."

She went back on medical leave for five months, receiving $250 a month in disability payments from her union. When that stopped, she continued to survive on her income tax refund, close to $7,000 for each of the last two years. When that ran out, she went on on public assistance, which was less than $300 a month.

"I wanted to work, but all I knew was boilers," she said. Without other skills, she felt crippled. By the end of September, her bills were mounting and she was four months behind on the rent, owing close to $2,300, plus a cable and phone bill of about $475.

With the stress, she lost sleep. One late night in August, she was searching the Internet and found an ad for training at the Grace Institute, which offers tuition-free business training to disadvantaged women. "It had everything I was looking for," she said. "My eyes began to well up."

The institute is an affiliate of the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. In September, she began taking classes five days a week, learning administrative skills, including how to type and how to use office software.

But she continued to have financial problems. In September, she was 72 hours away from being evicted when she confided in Anne Yackee, a social worker at the institute. "I had no one else to turn to," Ms. Green said.

Ms. Yackee advised Ms. Green to go immediately to housing court. There, Ms. Green informed the judge that $1,874 would be paid from Jiggets, a rent subsidy, and that public assistance was paying the $426 balance. Ms. Yackee also spoke with Elizabeth Savage, the student affairs coordinator, who approached Catholic Charities on Ms. Green's behalf. With money from the Neediest Cases, Ms. Green was able to pay $475 for the phone.

For the past four months, Ms. Green has excelled at the institute. After graduation in February, she hopes to work in an office while continuing her studies to be a respiratory therapist. To keep her focused on her goal, the Neediest Cases money was used to pay $70 for the application fee at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She has applied for a grant that she hopes will cover the tuition.

"I am so blessed, I am so blessed, " she said, referring to all the help she has received.

"Everything is changing. I am going to school; I am going to get a great job. I feel so good."