Katrina's Second Wind

"My son's got a studio apartment, and says he'll sleep on the patio," Thomas says.

But without her own physical address, Thomas says both her ALTC care and the $143 per month she receives in food stamps will stop.

Ian Wingfield

Disabled Phoenix resident Kaydee Thomas is all packed up with -- possibly -- no place to go.

Peter Scanlon

A Red Cross volunteer embraces a Katrina evacuee.

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More About

• Kaydee Thomas
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Ricardo Gerakos
• Natural Disasters
• Hurricanes and Cyclones

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"I will not survive one week on the street, and I cannot live in a shelter," she says. Thomas says she has enough trouble right now just coping with the pesticides and barbecue fumes around her current apartment building.

"The politicians are treating us like a bunch of matchsticks," she says. "And they arbitrarily make decisions based on how few matchsticks are going to need to be tossed aside . . . I'm not going to be a matchstick."