Actually I've filed several patents, have a few that have issued over the years too. I hope you weren't mislead by some attorney that you have to be a lawyer to file a patent.
I don't know if you read stuff from Nolo press [1] but we are fortunate that you can get the help you need for filing a patent in Sunnyvale [2] The last time I checked the filing fee was like $1500. You do need to put it in the form required for the application, and you need to respond when the patent examiner sends your patent back with questions.
Attorneys are nice, they provide a service which takes a lot of worry out of things and some of them are pretty aggressive at getting the patent issued even if the claims whittle down to something fairly obscure but they do charge by the hour. The last time I saw the bill for doing the patent paperwork it was about $12,000 total.
