This week, we’d like to help a 17 year old girl called Beth, who has a neurological disorder and spends most of her days at home on her own.

Up until the age of 16, Beth was living the life of a healthy teenage girl. She had started her A levels...then one day she came home from school not feeling well...3 weeks later she was in hospital. Since being discharged, she has attempted to go school but is very weak and can barely leave the house.

Beth has been diagnosed with a neurological disorder and various other things, all of which are deteriorating her movement and her quality of life. They are hoping that with treatment, her mobility will improve but this is not immediately on offer so in the meantime they need help.

Her mum is a single parent on a low income. She works full time as well as looking after Beth and her younger brother on her own. She hates leaving Beth during the day to go to work, but they need the money, so she is trying to keep working for as long as she can. At the moment, she has a friend pop in twice a day to check on Beth and make sure she has eaten and drunk enough, but the current situation is not sustainable. Beth’s mum said she seems to have fallen between the cracks of children’s services and adult services...but she is in the process of trying to get some assessments done to see what help is available to them.

The main issue they have at the moment is Beth’s bedroom. It is upstairs, so if she is not out of bed when her mum leaves for work in the morning she stays upstairs all day as it’s not safe for her to attempt the stairs on her own (the friend that comes is unable to support her down the stairs due to her own health needs). Her care needs are slowly increasing, so her mum is desperate to move her into a downstairs room as soon as she can. It will give her much more independence and dignity and make all of their lives so much easier.

Beth’s mum has saved, borrowed and enlisted the help of friends to create a usable downstairs bedroom for Beth...but the room is empty and she has no funds left to furnish it.

The room is smaller than Beth’s existing bedroom, so she needs a new bed. Her current room has built in wardrobes, so she also needs some storage for her clothes. We would love to help with these practical items...but we’d also like to do a little bit more for her. Beth has been through a really tough couple of years and her life has changed drastically from what it was. One of her former teachers told me that Beth has always been an incredibly bright, hard working and kind girl....even after she fell ill, she continued to volunteer and do what she could to help other people, until it became impossible for her to carry on.

“She is not the kind of person to take other people's kindness for granted and she would always 'pay it back' in kind and support others in need,” she said.

Beth is going to be spending a lot of her time in this room and she cried when she found out we were going to try to help furnish it for her. With your help, we want to make it somewhere really special for her.