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Kennetta Wainwright doesn't keep track of the amount of money she owes in medical bills anymore.

From the three admissions to the hospital she's had over the last year for a thyroid disorder, the bills have run into the tens of thousands because she doesn't have health insurance. But the bills – and thinking about how to even begin paying them back – are the least of her worries.

A few weeks ago at the Glenarden Library, she was trying desperately to get cell phone reception. If she could make contact with a client for her book tour promotion company, Wainwright Promotions, she could land a contract for as much as $12,000 that would ensure she and her 15-year-old daughter wouldn't have to sleep on the streets next month. But her cell phone kept failing, leaving her only to hope that it wouldn't be too late to reach the client the next day.

Wainwright, 39, and her daughter have been homeless since Jan. 4, her daughter's birthday. They've lived in shelters, slept on the floor of Wainwright's former office and are now awaiting eviction from an apartment paid for by a charity organization during the last two months. It was essentially Wainwright's loss of health insurance that landed them in this predicament, she said. A little more than two years ago, she left her job as a corporate sales representative at Borders and took a job at a small publishing firm. That was about the time her hyperactive thyroid started to act up again, leaving her in various stages of muscle paralysis for hours at a time. At the small firm, she said her boss was not happy to see her ill and unable to work a 40-hour week.

"I tried to keep the publishing job for the health insurance and stick it out for that," Wainwright said.

But eventually her health problems became too much to handle, so she quit in June 2007 to pursue freelance work which would mean variable paychecks but the opportunity to work on her own schedule. In the blink of an eye, she became one of the more than 150,000 Prince George's County residents the U.S. Census cites as living without health insurance. The county has the highest number of uninsured residents in the state.

Since then Wainwright said her thyroid problems, which were originally diagnosed in 1998, have gotten more severe, preventing her from freelancing full time. Several times a week she has thyroid attacks, which elevate her heart rate and leave her unable to see or speak.

"[People say] ‘If you are having these four to five times a week, why didn't you keep going back to the hospital?' Well, because you keep leaving with a bill," Wainwright said.

Her daughter, Mariantanna Henry, is the only relative in the area who can take care of her. Her other two sons are away at college but she doesn't want them to interrupt their education to care for her. The most Mariantanna can do when not in class at Charles Herbert Flowers High School is try to comfort her mother through the thyroid attacks. Wainwright's tried to hold off going to the hospital as much as possible, but the attacks tend to scare people into taking her in.

"When I saw the episode she had, that was really scary stuff," said Wainwright's friend Doris Reed, a Laurel resident who works as the executive director of the Association of Supervisory and Administrative School Personnel. "I've just been trying to help her ever since."

Reed helped most recently when Wainwright was admitted to Prince George's Hospital in Cheverly on Oct. 17. While there, Wainwright claims she was discriminated against for not having health insurance.

"[The doctor] said I needed to leave because I was taking up space and had no way to pay for it and real sick people needed a bed," Wainwright said.

While Wainwright was fighting orders to be discharged with what she maintains is an incorrect diagnosis for an anxiety reaction, Reed contacted a slew of politically connected county leaders to lobby on Wainwright's behalf.

"It shouldn't take the [county] sheriff and NAACP and people we know from Donna Edwards' office and that much pressure from those kind of people to have the hospital treat her like a human being," said Reed, naming off those who called the hospital to demand treatment for Wainwright. "How many people are out there and don't have anyone to call and are just out there on the street?"

One person who took up Wainwright's complaint was June White Dillard, president of the county chapter of the NAACP, who said this was the first allegation of discrimination against an uninsured person she had dealt with.

"We have not gotten complaints of the hospital since I've been here," Dillard said. "Most complaints deal with employment, police brutality or schools. This would be something new."

Dillard said after she called the hospital, she was assured Wainwright would be seen by an endocrinologist; however, Wainwright said she never was.

Without a primary care physician to advocate for her, Wainwright said doctors didn't believe she was suffering from thyroid problems and issued drug tests or offered her admittance to the psychiatric ward instead, refusing her requests for a thyroid scan.

"Prince George County Hospital couldn't do a better job?" Wainwright said. "All they had to do was run some tests."

The president of Prince George's Hospital System, John O'Brien, did not return calls seeking comment.

About half of the patients treated at Prince George's Hospital do not have health insurance. While the hospital employs case workers to apply for Medicare and other programs to reimburse the hospital for those who qualify, the high number of uninsured patients has caused the hospital system, which also includes the Laurel and Bowie facilities, to lose about $13.5 million a year.

The continuing losses and rising costs for needed renovations led the county and state last summer to appoint an independent authority to find a private buyer for the hospitals. The group is currently seeking bids from companies in hopes of presenting a sale deal to the Maryland General Assembly in January.

In the weeks since the October attack that prompted Wainwright to seek help at the hospital, she went to a local clinic for diagnosis instead. There, a doctor signed off on approval for disability, allowing her to now collect money from Social Services. She received her first disability assistance check for $453 last week but said it is hardly enough to pay for an apartment and living expenses in the area.

Her time has run out at her apartment in Glenarden, which was paid for by the Sheriff Michael A. Jackson Charities Foundation for the last two months. She is considering moving away from the Washington, D.C., area altogether but wants to stay through at least Dec. 11, the date of her appointment with a specialist at University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

The Medicaid she applied for through Social Services should also have kicked in by then, allowing her to seek thyroid surgery, which she believes is her only option to get better. But where she and her daughter will stay in the meantime or how they will be able to get their lives back together are ever present questions in the back of her mind.

"I want to be healthy and get back to working," Wainwright said. "I just keep coming back to what are you supposed to do and how are you supposed to live?"

E-mail Andrea Noble at anoble@gazette.net.