FIVE local community nurses will shave their heads on Saturday, November 19 in order to raise funds for various cancer charities and a lung charity.

Wendy Firth, Traci-Ann Yelland, Ali Purkiss, Teresa Sanderson and Karen Pellow are a group of brave community nurses who intend to shave all of their hair off for charity. They said that they each intended to raise £1,000, creating a team target of 5,000.

The three charities which the ladies will be fundraising for are Hospiscare Devon, Cancer Research UK, Alpha 1 Awareness UK. The fundraising head shave event will take place from 7pm at The Green Dragon in Northlew.

Wendy said: ‘We are all community nurses and we all treat patients everyday suffering with cancer who are going through chemotherapy with the awful side effects that include losing their hair. We also work very closely with Hospiscare nurses who are invaluable to these patients and their families and also to us as colleagues. We wanted to show our support and admiration to all these sufferers.

‘Each and everyone of us knows a loved one who has either suffered/survived or devastatingly not survived cancer. The charity Alpha 1 Awareness UK is my personal charity of choice as my husband has Alpha 1 Antitrypsin Deficiency which is a rare genetic deficiency which causes lung and liver disease. It has given him extensive emphysema which is debilitating and he is needing a double lung transplant. So, it is so important to me to raise awareness of this disease and help fund further research for treatment and cure so my husband and all the Alpha sufferers current and yet to be diagnosed can benefit.

‘I am not scared about shaving off all my hair as I feel it is a very tiny sacrifice to be able to support sufferers of cancer who have no choice of losing their hair. Mine will grow back. I feel I will be able to have just a little bit of empathy to my patients going through chemotherapy.

‘But obviously not suffering all what comes with having cancer. We are all nurses and all care so much about our patients and realise how sensitive this is but we are doing this with only our best intentions to help raise as much money as possible to help continued research into treatments and cure.

‘We’re all looking forward to wearing lots of different woolly hats for the winter. My boss Traci-Ann Yelland, who is also doing the head shave, is knitting us some fun colour co-ordinated hats for us to wear with our uniform at work!’

Ali Purkiss added: ‘Having lost my mum when I was just 20-years-old and it had a major impact on my life, and then my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer four years later when she was only 29. When my husband was diagnosed with prostrate cancer when my daughter Mae was just 1-year-old and then a year later it came back and he had to have radiotherapy. Cancer has impacted on my life so much and caused the people I love so much heartache that we need to cure it and this is why I am trying to raise money.

‘I am really not looking forward to shaving my head but feel it is a very small price to pay to show sufferers that we care about how they feel and are aware that losing their hair is one of the worst things about cancer and its treatment.

‘My own Mum was worried so much about losing her hair. But, my hair will grow back and we are aware some cancer sufferers aren’t so lucky. We need to raise as much money as we can to help cure this horrible disease that still has any person diagnosed with it trembling with fear and worried about dying. No child should lose their parent and maybe with research we can stop cancer killing people.’

If you wish to support the nurses you can visit their Just Giving webpage www.justgiving.com/teams/NHS