Page 308 - She's One Crazy Lady!

and down) and ‘Alison’ who I had met a few weeks earlier stood there, visibly upset, saying she was worried about her Mum who had breast cancer.
“Would you like to come up for a coffee?’
It was only 9.15am.
Sitting down with Pop and Alison, lo and behold, the bell rang again!
Phew!
Another lady stood on the doorstep and was visibly distressed:
“I’m having a mastectomy tomorrow and I’m so scared!”
“OK”, I said. “Would you like to come in – have a coffee?”
I followed her up the stairs and for a brief moment, smiled. Three
people now, all needing time and support. The four of us sat round the table and when I had to momentarily answer the phone, or whatever, the three of them were comfortable chatting together. This, apart from having storage space and a meeting place, was why having our own ‘base’ was so, so vital. As soon as our office doors opened, people saw it as a safe place to come along and talk away from a hospital environment – to meet others in a similar position. Incidents like that Monday morning were to happen quite regularly. Pop and Alison became highly valued and active members of our ever-growing team and the start of our Support Group meetings.
(A few weeks after our burglary we were burgled again – our front door had been smashed in – just days before we had an alarm system installed – with iron grills and bars ordered to fit behind a much stronger
and more secure front door!) We were told it was ‘opportunists’ who were inquisitive about a charity setting up shop in the middle of an industrial estate.
It wasn’t ideal but it was our ‘home’ and we were very proud of it.)
Over the next weeks and months our office was set up to enable volunteers to come in on a regular basis to help us get events ready and to do many of the repetitive, time-consuming jobs. Our volunteers were ‘AMAZING’. We also worked quickly to organise and advertise a weekly Coffee and Chat morning to incorporate certain complimentary therapies as mentioned previously... at times there were so many come along you could feel the floorboards quiver! They were SO popular and we went on to meet some incredible people – many ‘characters’ – and to do wonderful things together. We would like to have held these sessions more than once a week and we did try by offering a Tuesday morning but, for some reason, everyone was content to meet just on a Thursday. We also tried to set up something similar up in Corby, to widen our network, but sadly, those never took off. Over the years at our Thursday mornings we were introduced
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