Gillian Wheatley

A WHEELCHAIR user has described her anguish after her belongings were stolen twice from the back of her chair in just 10 days.

Gillian Wheatley, 65, was shopping in Camden High Street the first time she noticed her bag – containing a pillow and an ice-pack to keep a bottle of water cool – was missing. The second time her bag was stolen, last Friday, it contained three months’ worth of medication, alongside a replacement pillow and ice-pack and the last of her favourite canvas bags.

“First of all I was angry, but then I thought, ‘Oh, if you’re that desperate, that you’ve got to nick an old pillow and an ice-pack from a disabled person, you’re welcome to it’ sort of thing,” the former intensive neonatal midwife said.

Ms Wheatley was on her way home to Hilldrop Crescent in Holloway when both thefts happened, after finishing one of her weekly dialysis sessions she undertakes at the Mary Rankin ward at St Pancras Hospital. She takes a pillow in with her as the ones in the ward are uncomfortable.

A practising Buddhist who chants, she describes herself as “soft” and will always give her spare money to charity and homeless people.

Ms Wheatley believes she was targeted after leaving a store

“But I won’t be chanting to this person’s happiness,” she added. “I have to say, I did get a bit teary after the second time. I cried a bit. And I thought to myself, I can’t believe it happened twice in 10 days. Then next, I thought, ‘What sort of person steals from a disabled person?’ You know, I’m in a wheelchair, it’s not like I’m striding along tall and fit and healthy. And then I felt a little bit scared. Because, you know, anybody who would do that, what else would they do?”

Ms Wheatley worked in midwifery from 1982 until she was forced to retire due to ill-health in 2012.

She described waking up one morning with a sore foot and being unable to walk on it, before going on to be diagnosed, initially with psoriatic arthritis associated with her psoriasis. After being given immune suppressant drugs, she developed kidney damage and was forced to start attending dialysis, but had to wait another year before she was given different treatment. By that stage she was wheelchair bound.

She has managed to get a new prescription for her medication and a more secure way of attaching her bags to her chair, but says the thefts have had a lasting effect on her.

“I never think of myself – I’ve never thought of myself – as vulnerable, until this happened,” she said. “And now I do feel vulnerable.”

She established that the thefts could only have occurred at the crossing directly outside the store, and is warning others of the dangers – and appealing to all to be kind to each other, especially at Christmas time.