Laura Schultz sits surrounded by an army of medicine bottles that keep her 49-year-old body going.

She takes her last pill of the day at midnight.

Schultz has survived two kinds of cancer, cataracts, seizures and a pituitary tumor. Her immune system malfunctions. Her bones don't heal properly. Her intestines process too quickly. She vomits daily. A tube feeds oxygen through her nose. And now her blood is showing a protein that is sometimes an early warning sign for blood cancer.

For a dozen years, Schultz worked as an engineer at Rocky Flats, the nuclear weapons plant between Denver and Boulder that made plutonium triggers for atomic bombs until it shut down production in the 1990s.

She believes that all her ailments - and a litany of former co-workers' troubles that she knows by heart - are related to working at the plant.

Schultz celebrated in 2000 when then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, now governor of New Mexico, became the first official to publicly acknowledge that nuclear weapons workers had been placed in harm's way in the push to build atomic bombs from World War II through the Cold War.

She welcomed the news in 2001, when Congress announced a compensation program would give workers with job-related illnesses $150,000 and pay their medical bills.

She applied - and has been waiting four years - for help.

"If they wait long enough, we'll all die off and the story will go away," Schultz said.

Schultz applied for compensation for kidney cancer, one of 22 cancers with known links to radiation exposure listed in the compensation program.

But the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recently ruled there was only a 39.9 percent chance that her cancer was caused by the work she did at Rocky Flats. The government scientists arrived at that figure after poring through old records retrieved from boxes, vaults and computers at the plant. They developed a formula to estimate how much radiation Schultz might have been exposed to.

To qualify for financial and medical help, the formula had to spit out an estimate of at least a 50 percent likelihood her cancer was caused by her exposures.

Schultz said the government didn't take into account that, while her job records showed her headquartered in one building, she "crawled around" in every radioactive building on-site. She worked regularly in one building that was once considered the most dangerous in North America.

It was where workers formed plutonium into triggers for bombs using 5,300 different types of chemicals.

"They didn't monitor us for chemicals," Schultz said.

Schultz has one last appeal of the government's decision. But she and her husband, Jeff, who worked at the plant but is healthy, don't put much faith in that appeal. Instead, they are hoping former Rocky Flats workers will be grandfathered into the compensation program.

When Congress created the program, it was clear that records from some sites would not be reliable enough to use in re-creating a dose estimate. In those cases, the lawmakers said, groups of workers could be given "special exposure cohort" status if they suffered one of the 22 types of cancers on the list. They would not face what lawmakers called the impossible burden of trying to prove their prior exposures.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was, by law, supposed to decide whether Rocky Flats' workers qualified for this status within six months of their application for it. But two years have passed since the application was filed.

Now a decision is expected the first week of May.

"When I had (the kidney) cancer, I didn't know if I was going to live or die," Schultz said. "I still don't know if I'm going to live or die. But I have hope that I'm going to live a good, long life. And I have faith that we will prevail. This is our last-ditch chance."

frankl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5091