"Eventually I realized it didn't make any sense," Angela says. "I was working 2½ hours a day because it was the only time I could work because (my brother) had to go to work."

While working at Pizza Hut, Angela made $7.50 an hour, or $15,600 a year. This put her below the poverty line, which for a single parent with three children is $18,307. As such through the Family Independence Agency she qualified through the state for $400 in food stamps, day care and subsidized rent for her Monroe apartment.

That was before Tabatha got sick.

While working, Angela brought in $1,600 a month, counting her pre-tax wages and $300 in food assistance money. Now Tabatha qualifies for SSI assistance of $552 a month. Angela gets $413 cash assistance from Monroe County Family Independence Agency. Once the SSI kicked in, her food stamps were decreased to $118 a month. She now has a budget of $1,083 a month, one-third less than what she had to work with before Tabatha got sick. There are many times when it simply isn't enough.

"It's definitely a lot easier being able to work for money," Angela says.

Finances are a constant worry. There always has to be enough cash in the house for gas in case she needs to unexpectedly rush Tabatha to the hospital in Ann Arbor. Her phone service must include long distance, so she can call doctors, which she does often. The bill can sometimes be surprisingly high.

But without a doubt, the hardest thing to manage is food.

"I'll get to a point where there's nothing in there at all," Angela said. "The first week of the month, Tabatha is on steroids and all she wants to do is eat."

Tabatha loves pizza rolls, chicken nuggets, ham, pepperoni and chicken. To stretch her food dollar, Angela shops at Sav-A-Lot. But there have been five, six times when the money had run out and the cupboards were bare. At that point Angela picks up the phone and makes the difficult call to her aunt to ask for help.

"That's hard, especially when you have to ask a lot," she said.

This summer, a fundraiser was raised to help Angela pay for certain medications not covered by Medicaid and to get Tabatha a computer. Now that she's no longer in preschool, Angela hopes educational programs on the computer will keep her from falling behind.

Angela never had big dreams for herself, but she never imagined herself here. Her struggles began long ago. She never liked school and by her freshman year at Monroe High School she barely bothered to go to class. At 16, when the law would allow it, she dropped out. She got a job and she partied. She met a guy and at 17 got pregnant. It was a shock, but also a blessing.

"When my first kid came along, that straightened me out," Angela says.

She gave up the drinking and quit smoking pot. She and Collin's father tried to make things work but their relationship fell apart. Angela has been on her own ever since.

"I was an instant mom," she says. "It was hard, but I did it."

Without a high school diploma and with few skills, the job pickings were slim. Mostly she's worked as a waitress. Pizza Hut was the first place Angela saw some opportunity to move up the ranks. The job she liked the best, though, was a three-month stint at Delta USA. She was working with her hands, and each day brought something different. But after three months she was laid off.

She misses working, if for no other reason than it got her out of the house. Everything in Angela's life now revolves around Tabatha's cancer. Ask her what she does all day and she points to herself, sitting on her couch, talk shows blaring from the television, her children playing nearby.

"You're looking at it," she says.

Angela does not feel sorry for herself, only for her daughter and what she has to deal with. But she does admit she misses the way things used to be.

"I love work," Angela says. "I miss being out of the house."

The State of Michigan requires that in order to qualify for cash assistance, a person must be working or actively looking for work. There are few exceptions, and one is having to care for a sick child.

Earlier this summer, Angela was optimistic that an end to this nightmare was in sight. Tabatha was responding well to chemotherapy. The date was coming closer and closer when she would be in remission.

But things took a turn for the worse and Tabatha regressed. The hunt was on for a bone marrow transplant. Neither her mother nor brothers are a match. Chemotherapy continued and soon Tabatha started responding again. Every Monday Angela takes Tabatha to Ann Arbor and after three weeks of that, she receives four straight days of inpatient care. All of this was made much more difficult a couple of weeks ago, when Angela totaled her car in an accident.

"I'll have to see if (the Monroe County Opportunity Program) can help me," she says. Fortunately, the agency can.

All Angela wants now out of life is for Tabatha to be well. After chemotherapy, Tabatha comes home and vomits. She also needs to receive platelets, which make her break out in hives.

"I miss her not being sad," Angela said. "I don't like seeing her looking sick. It's sad seeing her like that. When she's at the hospital, she wants to come home but she can't."

Once Tabatha's well again, Angela plans to pick up where she left off.

"I want to get that manager's job at Pizza Hut and get out of here," she says.