Dennis and Wendy Strange, both 66, from Gosport, have raised £2,000 for QA and Southampton Hospitals after holding a fundraising evening at Fareham Working Mens Club on Friday, November 10, 2023. The money has been raised after Dennis was diagnosed with brain cancer in October 2022 and it is his way of saying thank you for the care and support he got whilst he was in hospital for over 9 months.
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00:00 Hi, can you introduce yourselves?
00:02 Hi, yeah, I'm Dennis Strange, this is my wife Wendy.
00:05 So, tell me what you've been up to.
00:07 Well, we've had a bit of a bad 24 months.
00:13 Wendy lost her brother in March 22, through a form of lymphoma.
00:23 And then in October, the same year, I decided to go down with lymphoma as well.
00:33 So the last two years really has been hell for us both, and especially for Wendy.
00:40 What she's had to go through, supporting me, is fantastic as well.
00:44 And we decided with the chairman of our social club, Mr Tony Halkyard and his wife Pat, that we would try and raise some money for the guys at Macmillan Cancer Support Teams at both Southampton and at Portsmouth QA.
01:03 I particularly wanted to do it as a thank you to the hospital teams who give me so much support and care for me for over nine months while I was in QA and Southampton General.
01:16 Getting treatment for my brain cancer, which is my very small way of saying thank you to you guys.
01:23 So we arranged a charity night for a working men's club.
01:28 And on the evening we raised over £2,000.
01:33 That was Friday November 10th.
01:35 Yeah, Friday November 10th.
01:37 That money is to be split, £1,000 for each hospital, for the haematology and oncology wards. Mainly to improve on some of the facilities in a couple of the isolation rooms where facilities you have to pay for slightly more in Portsmouth than Southampton.
02:01 It will go towards making people a little bit more comfortable in the isolation wards.
02:08 That's the idea of it.
02:10 They need mini fridges too because the cancer patients after they have stem cells or cancer treatment, they need to be kept sterile.
02:20 And they need a fridge to keep their medication and eats and drinks in.
02:28 So that's what I think the money that they're going to use the money for.
02:32 We raised that, we'd like to say a big thank you to Sweeney Todd Band because they gave their time free.
02:38 And also DJ, the DJ gave his time free. DJ Newell I think his name was.
02:46 All the local companies that donated prizes, which we raised £1,000 on the raffle and £1,000 in ticket sales.
02:55 And also a big thank you to Fair and Reckonments Club for giving us the hall free.