A Piedmont woman packed a bag for the next patient. Thirteen years later, they are still going out.

Venecia Butler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. She spent a lot of hours after that in treatment chairs, and she noticed something nobody warns you about. You show up for chemo with no idea what to bring. It is cold. It is long. You forget a blanket, you forget something to read, and there is nothing to do but sit there.

So she started packing bags for other people. Blankets, chapstick, a journal, the specific things that had gotten her through her own treatments. She would hand them to patients starting out. It was a way of sitting with them when she could not actually be there.

Venecia's Foundation was formally established on July 25, 2013, and received its 501(c)(3) status the following June. Venecia died in 2015. The bags did not stop.

Thirteen years in, the foundation still runs out of Piedmont, and it still does the one thing she designed it to do: get something useful directly into the hands of a person in treatment.

The bags are not symbolic. Every item in one is there because Venecia or somebody who received a bag said it mattered.

That last one turned into a program of its own. Radiation patients often drive a long way, day after day, for weeks. The foundation now runs gas cards separately from the bags because the need outgrew the bag.

The reach is wider than Piedmont. The foundation serves patients across nine northeast Alabama counties: Calhoun, Cherokee, Clay, Cleburne, DeKalb, Etowah, Randolph, St. Clair, and Talladega. Bags get mailed further than that when somebody asks.

All of it is paid for by fundraisers, and the big one is the Crap Run every October, a 5K named for Venecia's own word for cancer. There is a Polar Plunge in January, where people jump into the Piedmont pool in the middle of winter on purpose. Last year's Crap Run alone raised more than $46,000.

The foundation runs on donations and volunteer hours. If you want to help, or you know somebody starting treatment who ought to have a bag, they are easy to reach.