SHE so very nearly didn’t go for what was her first mammogram in that 50-plus screening programme.

It was Christmas Eve and it was lashing down – at the end of that stormy week, in fact, when Hexham and Corbridge and many another pasture and place in the Tyne Valley were flooded by the rising River Tyne.

“It was a horrible day and I thought ‘I’m not going out in this just for a check-up’,” she said.

“But I say to people now, go! Don’t miss it, because it could save your life – it saved mine.”

Indeed, the lump that was detected in Tracy Scandle’s breast was so deep, she couldn’t detect it herself and wouldn’t have until it was too late.

Instead, as we stand in the garden of No 28, the community hub in the east end of Hexham, she counts her blessings that the diagnosis she received in January 2016 came in the nick of time.

Taking no chances, she opted for a full mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy and then had several rounds of debilitating chemotherapy.

And it is her account of that stage of her treatment that makes you realise why No 28 volunteer Liz Clark brought Tracy and the latest willing candidate to ‘brave the shave’ – Laura Peaker – together.

As a cancer survivor who had lost her lovely blonde hair during treatment, Tracy, who lives in Acomb, had come to mind when they were looking for someone to do the hair cut, said Liz.

And as for signing up for the fund-raiser in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, Laura said she’d had absolutely no hesitation after hearing the advert on Spotify while ironing her children’s school uniforms on the night before they went back to school.

She has good reason. Her grandfather, Richie Peaker, died of lung cancer in 2007, at the age of 73.

“My grandad, he was like my best friend,” said Laura, who lives a stone’s throw from No 28.

“I struggled to cope thinking what he was going through and there are people out there now going through what he did. I just wanted to help.”

While her hair would grow back, other people wouldn’t be so lucky, she said, if they didn’t live long enough for that to happen. And she had chosen to do this, unlike Tracy, who’d had no choice in the matter.

The latter certainly remembers the day her hair started falling out.

“It was about two weeks after my first chemo when it started coming out,” she said. “I got up one morning and it just started falling out in strands.

“My daughter’s a hairdresser, so I rang her and said ‘would you just cut it all off?’

“It was about the same length as Laura’s now (post-shave), so at least when it was falling out it was in short bits. Then it all just fell out.”

When Tracy began cutting Laura’s hair – an event Liz and Laura herself live-streamed over Facebook to supporters who couldn’t make it in person - she was careful to collect the little bunches the hair has been tied into in advance.

They went to the Little Princess Trust, which buys wigs for young cancer sufferers who both Laura and Tracy can empathise with.