If congressional leaders ever need an off-site location for one of those televised hearings on what's ailing the nation, they could use Brian and Laura Cooper's house in Moorestown.

Theirs is a story of the moment, a becoming-all-too-typical tale of a single family's weathering many storms at once: The mortgage meltdown. Unemployment. Cancer. The health-care crisis. Financial peril.

"And now," notes Laura, 45, "it looks like my car is dying."

"American?" I ask of the clunker.

Yup. It's a Plymouth Grand Voyager minivan with 110,000 miles.

Given the somber subjects, we talk in the living room out of earshot of the Coopers' three children. Brian projects stoic strength. Laura succumbs to her fears and tears.

"I feel like I'm on this iceberg that keeps cracking and cracking," she says, trying to explain the inexplicable chaos. "All I want to do is stay alive, save my house, and give my kids some normalcy."

But what is normal anymore?

When problems pile on

Laura took the first blow when her rare type of ovarian cancer was diagnosed. (She asks that I remind women it's Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. Go to www.ovarian.org to learn more about the symptoms.)

She began chemo in the fall of 2006, but a few months later "my kidneys started shutting down."

Her first remission proved short-lived when lower-back pain turned out to be a sign that the cancer had spread to her spine. A 2007 operation caused permanent nerve damage in her left leg. "Now I'm on heavy narcotics 24 hours a day," she says, "because the pain never goes away."

For years, Laura and Brian earned a comfortable living in the mortgage industry. But by the fall of 2008, she was on disability and he was out of a job.

"My last month at GMAC, I was the top sales rep in the Northeast," says Brian, 47. "The next month, the industry was disappearing and the company was gone."

He found other jobs, but spent nine months trying to sell loans that banks couldn't fund.

"He couldn't collect unemployment because he was, technically, employed," Laura notes. "He just wasn't getting paid."

So the Coopers drained their savings and juggled debt. The couple that had been just $12,000 away from paying off their home lurched into financial free fall.

"We couldn't get mortgage modification because we had no income," Laura explains. "And we couldn't take equity out of the house because we had all the hospital bills."

Coping and hoping

Laura has countless stories from her travels through a broken health-care system, such as the time her oncologist ordered a crucial $10,000 full-body scan that her insurance company then denied.

She tried to buy supplemental coverage, but "they all ask if you've had cancer in the last five years."

Had cancer? She still has it.

"The doctor told me I'm not considered curable anymore," she says, sobbing. "I'm treatable."

In the darkest hours, the Coopers force themselves to embrace what remains of their all-American life. They play basketball with the kids, ages 10, 12, and 15. They swim. They attend Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel, where parishioners have been generous and kind.

In June, Brian landed a salaried position in the title business. He hopes this company's insurer does right by his wife.

For fun, Laura buys a single lottery ticket, praying she'll win just enough to pay off the house and restore their financial footing.

"We're just a normal, average family," she says, "with three kids and a modest three-bedroom house."

It may sound boring, but after enduring so many misadventures, boring would be blissful.

As for the not-so-Grand Voyager parked out front?

Brian couldn't save the mortgage industry, cure his wife, or knock sense into insurance providers, but he's pretty sure he can fix that car.

Contact Monica Yant Kinney at myant@phillynews.com or 215-854-4670. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/yantkinney