Like many Americans who file for bankruptcy, Forrest Lane’s money problems started as health problems.

At first, he didn’t know what was wrong. He figured the stress of working long weeks as a supervisor at Jeld-Wen was giving him high blood pressure, so he took a lower-paying job with Pacific Lumber — then Universal Lumber — at the beginning of the housing boom in 1999.

Despite his pay cut, he and his wife were able to comfortably afford payments on their single-wide manufactured home in Deschutes River Woods. Soon they refinanced their $35,000 mortgage from Countrywide Home Loans in order to attach a $60,000 addition.

But Lane’s blood pressure was high and he was always tired. He ended up in the hospital with internal bleeding, and doctors discovered his pancreas was not making some enzymes necessary to digest food. He also has kidney disease, pulmonary disease and diabetes.

His wife, Linda, has a heart arrhythmia — a condition where “her heart flip-flops and starts beating twice as fast,” he said. They had health insurance, but the bills for doctors and prescriptions were piling up.

The couple took out a second mortgage to pay their medical and credit card bills — a safe bet because home prices were rising, the mortgage broker assured them — but their debts still mounted. They refinanced into an adjustable rate mortgage, and refinanced again before it could reset to a higher rate. “I was digging myself into a hole,” Lane said.

Bankruptcies spike later than other indicators in a recession and continue to go up after the economy starts to recover, economists say, because people exhaust all their options before filing. The Lanes had been struggling for years when Lane got laid off by Pacific Lumber in 2008.

He got a job as a delivery driver, but found he could no longer do physical labor. He worked in a call center, then got laid off. “That put me on unemployment, and the unemployment wasn’t much,” he said. “And so I said, ‘We’re going to lose the house.’”

But the house had lost 30 percent of its value, a Realtor told him, and probably wouldn’t sell anyway.

He and his wife were only earning $1,800 a month at the time, short of the $2,200 they needed to live and pay bills. That’s when he opened the phone book and called a bankruptcy attorney.

“I threw up my hands and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” he said.

Personal bankruptcies more than tripled in Central Oregon between 2007 and 2009, and 2010 is on track to be worse than last year.

Try getting through to a bankruptcy attorney in Deschutes or Crook County, and it’s obvious they’re slammed. Bankruptcy filings are “increasing, increasing, increasing,” said James Powers, a Prineville attorney who has been doing bankruptcies for more than 30 years. “I haven’t seen the light in the end of the tunnel. … It’s not healthy for society to have as many as we’re having now. I would hope that it would slow down, but I haven’t seen the slowdown.”

In Crook County, that’s in part due to a 17 percent unemployment rate, the highest in Oregon. Deschutes and Jefferson counties aren’t much better off, ranking third- and fifth-highest in the state, respectively.

James Forbes, an attorney in Bend, switched from land use to bankruptcy law almost two years ago because demand was so high. He said he’s been filing about three or four bankruptcies a week.

“The most common thing is that people have either lost their jobs or had their hours reduced, and they’ve hung on and hung on as long as they can, trying to make payments,” he said. “But the income just does not equal the expenses of paying off credit cards, and paying the mortgage, and often car payments, and because of the reduced income they just wind up with no choice.”

The vast majority of personal bankruptcies are filed under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code, liquidation, in which a trustee sells a debtor’s assets, distributes the money to creditors, and nullifies the remaining debt. Debtors must earn less than the state median income in order to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The other common type is filed under Chapter 13, in which the debtor works out a three- to five-year payment plan, and some debts may be nullified.

Chapter 7 bankruptcies cost about $1,000 and take about four months, while Chapter 13 bankruptcies cost between $2,500 and $5,000 and take between three and five years, local lawyers said.

Lane and his wife are among the thousands of Central Oregonians who have filed for bankruptcy since the start of the recession, many due to medical costs, the depressed housing market, sustained unemployment, or all three.

In March 2009, after talking to an attorney, Lane and his wife stopped paying their debts. They let the bank foreclose on their home, and moved into a cheap rental in Bend while they waited to file bankruptcy. Their case was delayed for months as their attorney filed more urgent cases for clients who were on the verge of having their wages garnished, getting foreclosed on, or being sued by their creditors.

Lane spent hours each week calculating his income and expenses over and over, terrified that he and his wife wouldn’t pass the means test for Chapter 7. They had more than $30,000 in outstanding medical and credit card bills, according to the bankruptcy petition. “We were scared to death,” he said.

He realized it was going to be all right in October 2009, after a painless meeting with the trustee. About two months later, the debt was gone.

He and his wife kept their cars, both worth less than $3,000, and all their household goods. He kept his checking and savings accounts at the same bank that had given him credit. His credit cards were immediately canceled, but he doesn’t miss those too often, he said.

“Bankruptcy was the best thing for me. I sleep a lot better at night,” he said.

But already, a doctor’s visit has set them back about $1,050, which they are paying in $50 monthly installments.

They haven’t been going to the doctor, in order to save money, Lane said, and he’s worried about what will happen if his car breaks down.

He started shopping in bulk at Costco, which he estimates saves them a few hundred bucks a year, and he’s looking for a job he can do from home, such as doing phone surveys or running errands for people on Craigslist.

For now, he and his wife are “on solid footing” with income from his disability benefits and her job as a pharmacy technician.

They’ll be fine, he said, as long as nothing happens.