The winner of the Cherry Lodge Cancer Care 2017 annual raffle was Sandra Clark, who, unfortunately, was not well enough to travel to Bruges but donated her prize to her daughter Jenny and granddaughter Imogen. They clearly had a wonderful time and sent the following message:
“We got back from Bruges yesterday evening. We are both so grateful that we had this opportunity to go and experience such a beautiful city. Waffles, hot chocolate, beer tasting and chocolate, we sampled it all! We walked miles, just wandering down beautiful cobbled streets.
We went to the Chocolate museum, the beer tasting bar and the History of Bruges as well as visiting lots of chocolate shops! Wherever we went everyone was so friendly and helpful. We had a fantastic time.”
Jenny’s own cancer story
“I was diagnosed on 27th December 2007 with triple-negative Grade 3 breast cancer. My tumour size was 5.5cm. I was 38 years old when I was diagnosed. I was very lucky that I had a very forward thinking consultant, so I had chemo-therapy first to see if the tumour would shrink in size. Luckily it did, in fact it was so small I had to have a clip inserted into the base of the tumour so that when the consultant operated he could actually find the area. I then had a lumpectomy and then 15 sessions of radio-therapy.
There was no way I was going to let this beat me! I am a great believer in positive thinking and the fact that I wasn’t about to leave my 7-year-old daughter without her mum! I had wonderful support from my family and friends, and also from Margaret and Freddy from Cherry Lodge who saw me every three weeks just before my chemo session to give me acupuncture and reiki, both of which (I felt) helped enormously. Freddy also, very kindly, drove me to a few of my radio-therapy sessions. I will be 10 years clear in September this year, so I can count myself one of the lucky ones.”
Click on the small images below to see larger, complete photographs. The second photo shows the ingredients for personalised hot chocolate – dark, milk, white or a mixture!
