A scene from a deep, frightening economic recession: Bette Spinale sits in her car in the parking lot of Kent Hospital in Warwick. She had been sitting at her computer at her home on Hayes Street when her heart started pounding. But in the hospital parking lot, she has one unavoidable thought: “I can’t afford the bill.”

So she drives back home. Then she feels pain up her arm and along her left side. She drives back to Kent and goes inside.

“They did a lot of tests and got me stabilized. They treated me great. They didn’t treat me any differently.”

She learned she has high blood pressure and cholesterol but she did not have a heart attack. Could there be stress in her life? Anxiety?

You could say that.

Spinale was doing OK a year ago. She wasn’t living large by any means, not as a single mother with two kids in college. But she had a job she loved and knew she was good at. She was paying the bills and maintaining small family rituals, including Chinese food on Friday nights.

She was laid off on a Thursday in July. She didn’t see it coming. She also didn’t see the slump in company earnings she was told was the reason for the job cuts.

“I was crushed, devastated. I had been getting great reviews.”

She had been working for two years as project coordinator for a research and development team at an electronics company in Cranston. There were a lot of meetings and a lot of time spent at career fairs and expos. She says she gave the company a lot of her own time, and the company sent her into unemployment without vacation pay she was owed or pay for the final week on the job. She calls it the beginning of her descent into Rhode Island Poor.

She came home, filed for unemployment benefits online and started sending out resumés. The unemployment benefits were about half her former take-home pay.

She sent out 80 resumés. In September, she was offered a job and took it. It’s for only 30 hours a week and at a lower hourly wage than she had received. But it is with a young company with the possibility of better things ahead if the economy improves.

For now, there is daily uncertainty, the knowledge there is more going out than coming in and the frustration with not being able to help her son and daughter as she would like. She receives no child support from her ex-husband. She thinks about looking for a second job.

So there is no more Chinese food on Fridays. Her daughter Jeana’s classical guitar lessons are history. She is dropping the house phone and cable TV, although she is hanging on to her computer because it is her connection to the job market. She doesn’t even think about a social life. She pays her mortgage by credit card.

“Last Saturday was my daughter’s 19th birthday. Without food stamps and cash to buy groceries, I could only buy her one slice of cake and stuck a candle in it.”

Throwing the ball in the backyard with Wally the wonderful springer spaniel is one of her few ways to let off a little steam. She looks forward to spring for the opportunity to go fishing — and maybe bring home dinner.

“I haven’t seen her relax since I don’t know when,” says Jeana Spinale, a sophomore at Rhode Island College.

Then there is the state Spinale lives in. Once, it gave her food stamps, then took them away. She is told her income is now too high. It is $200 a month more than her mortgage.

She’s pretty sure she’s eligible for heating assistance but she can’t connect with anyone at West Bay Community Action, which administers the assistance in Warwick. Her calls are not returned.

And just to keep the downhill roll going, the taxman called. Actually, it wasn’t a call, it was a letter, back in September, informing her she was short on her 2004 state taxes. With penalty, it said she owes $433.07, and if that amount isn’t paid her driver’s license will not be renewed when she turns 47 in May.

She called the office of taxation, then called again. And again. She went on a paper search all through her house, collecting her records to make her case. At one point, she was told she would have to meet with someone at the office of taxation, but she couldn’t actually make an appointment. She would just have to show up and hope someone would see her.

Like so many others in Rhode Island, she is finding one of the hardest things to find in hard times is a real human being who will sit down and answer questions.

And she still doesn’t know what the bill from Kent Hospital will be or how she will pay it.

There are thousands of stories like hers, but one of the most striking things about what is happening to Bette Spinale is what is also happening to Jeana Spinale. The idea of carefree college days is passing her by. She has to work to cover basic expenses and some of her college costs. The campus is not spared the hard lessons of the economic collapse.

“I don’t have a day off,” she says. “I’m in class or working. It’s seven days a week.”

She says students are more worried all the time and few see a future for themselves in Rhode Island.

“We’re not really having the experience of college,” she says. “It’s like no one’s having fun anymore.”

bkerr@projo.com