Can friends and a website save a sick woman's house?

If Lori Hall Steele could get off her ventilator long enough, she would have a heck of a story to write.

It's a tale involving a brutal disease, a questionable health insurance policy, a mortgage company going about its devastatingly matter-of-fact business and of several friends who are determined to share her plight with the world. They've built a web site called Save Lori's House, and are launching all the power in the blogosphere that they can to bring people to it, all in the hopes that their sick friend not have to go into this fight alone.

Ms. Steele, a 44-year-old divorced mom, is a freelance writer in Traverse City, Michigan. She wasn't one of those people who purchased a subprime mortgage gone bad. Ms. Steele hasn't been able to keep up her house payments because she has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. As anyone familiar with this disease knows, ALS turns people into statues that can only blink and breathe...and ultimately in most every case, not even that.

There is no cure, although people have been known to live for years with the disease. But complicating matters even more, Ms. Steele also has chronic Lyme disease.