A SINGLE mum from York who is battling cancer has been sending gifts to NHS staff, with a little help from her friends.

Julie Blackburn, 49, who is mum to nine-year-old Henry and lives in Bishopthorpe with her son and a boisterous puppy called Monty, works as an independent consultant for The Body Shop.

Julie has secondary breast cancer; after initially being diagnosed back in 2015, she was diagnosed with stage 4 in 2018.

Because she has had all her treatment at York Hospital oncology department she says she wanted to say thank you to the staff, so during January and February she asked her customers to help by buying hand creams and lip balms for the nurses.

“I wanted to say thank you because they are just amazing,” said Julie of the team at York Hospital.

“I am just so inspired and grateful to all of them over the last year.

“Because I have cancer I’m better off not working in a busy office environment so I work from home and I wanted to come up with a gift idea.

“The idea was to get as many hand creams, lip balms and lip butters as possible and pass them on to the York nurses especially those in ICU and the Covid wards.

“So in the end customers gave me money or added items to their orders and people were amazingly generous.

“More than £850 later and, with some help from two friends, it was delivered to the hospital staff.

“In the meantime I have received so many thank yous and photos from the nurses and the main doctor on the Covid ward - who was back at work after having Covid herself.”