After 29 years as a cancer unit nurse at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, Ron Redmon never dreamed he'd be spending his middle age scrambling to save a different type of ill patient:  his own Guerneville home, set for a foreclosure sale by Wells Fargo Bank.

But he has -- and it's still not over.

Two weeks ago, Redmon narrowly averted losing his home of 35 years when a foreclosure sale set for Jan. 11 was postponed until March. It was the third time Redmon got a foreclosure sale postponement at the 11th hour -- the previous time, the postponement was approved an hour and 45 minutes after the sale deadline at the Sonoma County Courthouse in Santa Rosa.

"You'd think the government and the lenders would want you to stay in your home," said Redmon, 60, whose family has owned the 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom restored 1906 country house for 35 years without missing a mortgage payment. "What we're looking at is an absolute bureaucratic nightmare."

Although Redmon's story is unique, his situation is not. 

In Healdsburg alone, out of 83 properties sold in the last six months, nine were short sales and seven were bank-owned -- meaning the homes had been foreclosed on by the lender and taken back, said Teri Shaughnessy, a real estate estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Santa Rosa who specializes in helping homeowners process short sales --or sales where the proceeds are less than the money owed on the property.

"It's a difficult place for people to be in," said Shaughnessy, whose website is  Www.ShortSaleHelpInSonomaCounty.com, "You would maybe not expect this as much in Healdsburg, but it's everywhere."

In fact, all across California and the nation, thousands of homeowners are facing eerily similar versions of Redmon's scenario with different banks. Though the facts may be different, all versions lead to one place: short sales or foreclosure.

"The foreclosure crisis is one of my top priorities," said U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-1st, whose district includes Healdsburg and Guerneville, in an e-mail statement this month. "It is the number one type of casework done in our district offices.

Thompson said he co-sponsored legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif.,  in the 111^th Congress that would stop the wave of foreclosures by allowing homeowners with mortgages that are backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac -- which includes most homeowners at this point -- to refinance their mortgages at historically low interest rates. 

"I am a co-sponsor of this legislation again in the 112^th Congress," Thompson said. "I  will continue to work on additional legislation to alleviate the housing and foreclosure crisis."

Fannie Mae earlier this month launched a program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure called WaysHome. In addition,  the Obama administration's 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP,  run by the U.S. Treasury Department, has set up a hotline to help homeowners at  1-888-994-HOPE (4673).

HAMP, the agency Redmon has been struggling to enroll in, is set up to help familie  cut their mortgage interest payments down as low as 2 percent through a loan modification. Financed through $50 billion in Wall Street bailout money and $25 billion from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the program has had very limited success, according to an Oct. 26 Huffington Post article about an anti-HAMP protest outside the state capitol in Salem, Ore.

President Obama, the article said, estimated HAMP would be able to help 3 to 4 million people to modify their mortgages.

"But through September, 728,686 struggling homeowners have been kicked out the program; just 640,300 remain, the Treasure Department reported on Monday," the Huffington Post article said.

In general, to be eligible for HAMP, a family must live in their home, owe less than $729,750 and pay more than 31 percent of their monthly income in mortgage payments, according to the Huffington Post article. If people are accepted and then successfully complete a three-month "trial" period, they are eligible for a five-year locked-in loan modification.

But it doesn't always work out that way.

In January 2010, Redmon and his family were accepted into the HAMP program. They sought the program out because Redmon, who had knee surgery two years earlier, was no longer able to work his half-time nursing job and was down to his other half-time job, teaching in the nursing program at Santa Rosa Junior College.

With the reduced income, Redmon wanted to secure HAMP's promised low mortgage interest level of about 2 percent -- an interest rate that would almost cut his  family's mortgage payments in half.

But a year later, Wells Fargo Bank is still not accepting Redmon's HAMP-level mortgage payments, saying that unless the family pay $27,000 in "reinstatement amount" fees, their home will be sold in foreclosure.

The "reinstatement amount" is the sum accumulated after Wells Fargo foreclosed on the Redmons' home and returned their HAMP-level payment and refused further ones, Redmon said. 

Months went by of no progress, despite Redmon calling every week.

At the end of last year, the bank assigned a one-on-one loan specialist to the Redmon family -- just after Healdsburg Patch contacted Wells Fargo for a comment.Redmon said having one person to work with on his case has helped.

"Someone higher up in Wells Fargo finally helped us reapply to HAMP," Redmon said this week. "We are told we have been accepted, but we haven't gotten final approval."

Prior to that, Redmon said he has never spoken to the same person twice. Every week that he was calling in to the bank during 2010, he got a different person and they they "always say something is missing," Redmon said.

He said he has had to fax all his paperwork-- including tax data, pay stubs and mortgage loan contracts--over and over again to the bank, only to have them say the file is incomplete the following week.

"This was the reason given by Wells Fargo for the foreclosure, that updated documents were not in place, since no payments were ever late or missed," Redmon said.

Redmon said he hopes by telling his story, it will help the legions of others out there struggling.

"Hopefully something can be done on our case that will help educate people," Redmon said. "If people are going through this, they should get professional help.

"What upsets me is how many others are going through this," he added. "I was shown a list of foreclosures just in the Guerneville area, and there were 36 homes on the list."

Shaughnessy, who said she suffered her own substantial real estate investment losses between 2000 and 2009, said she returned in March 2010 to Sonoma County to try to help other people get through their home mortgage crises intact and get back to their lives.

"People do need to ask for professional help to move through this thing," said Shaughnessy. "There are dignified solutions -- people don't need to be afraid."

She said she recently helped a single mom in Healdsburg sell her home in a short sale. On moving day, the truck was late. The buyer, in an impatient gesture, threatened to pull out -- meaning that the mom would have had to start all over again with negotiations.

"It really is an emotional tsunami," Shaughnessy said. "There's a roller coaster of emotions that you're going through every day."

Wells Fargo Bank is only one of several major national banks that received billions of federal Wall Street bailout money from Obama during the recession.

Wells Fargo alone received $25 billion in bailout funds, said Steven Lezell, an attorney with the law firm Edelson McGuire, LLC, in Chicago.

"Under any metric, Wells Fargo's home loan modification process has been a nightmare for its borrowers," says a class action lawsuit Lezell's firm filed last year against Wells Fargo on behalf of plaintiff Lori Wigod, a Wells Fargo mortgage loan customer.

"Wells Fargo ignores its customers wholeheartedly with a passion,"  Lezell earlier this month, adding that he has so far heard from at least 300 other homeowners with similar complaints as Wigod. "They do not process the paperwork and they destroy documents."

Wells Fargo filed a motion to dismiss the suit in July. The case is still pending in federal court as to whether it will be certified, Lezell said.

 "This lawsuit is n0thing m0re than an attempted end-run around the enf0rcement mechanisms set f0rth in HAMP, which d0 n0t permit private acti0ns by b0rr0wers against l0an servicers – wh0 are v0luntary participants in the HAMP pr0gram," Wells Fargo's motion to dismiss states.

Asked about cases such as Redmon's, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo spokesman Chris Hammond said the bank was "doing whatever we can to assist homeowners," he said.

"We're doing whatever it takes to keep homeowners in their homes," he said.

Hammond said that "nobody wins with foreclosure," and that Wells Fargo was committed to avoiding it. He said the bank works with homeowners one-on-one to help steer them through the process to avoid foreclosure.

But Lezell claimed that Wells Fargo has a systematic plan to prevent a homeowner from ever speaking to the same mortgage loan process clerk, week to week. He said the bank hires hourly workers at low pay who are unfamiliar with the complexities of the loan modification process.

Wells Fargo is not the only bank getting complaints for the way it is participating in the HAMP program. In September, Bank of America was sued by some of its mortgage loan customers over the loan modification process, the Huffington Post reported.

Redmon said he and his family have weathered these incredibly stressful times only by relying on their personal faith.

"Far above luck, skill, connections or perserverance, the single most important reason we have survived all of this is God's providence," said Redmon, a member of a nondenomenational Christian congregation called Grace Fellowship in Santa Rosa.

"The love, prayers and support of our spiritual family enabled us to stand in the face of a corporate system and not flinch," he said. "Even if we lose our home, we are not afraid."