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Customers Rally Around Brooklyn Coffee Shop Owner Diagnosed With Breast Cancer

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- New Yorkers can get very attached to their local coffee shops.

Now, one Brooklyn Neighborhood is helping a shop owner battle cancer, and keep her in business.

Meghan Daly serves up coffee and every slice of her well known pie with lots of care.

"This business is everything. It's everything that I have," she said.

Daly is the owner of Daly Pie Cafe in Prospect Heights. It has plenty of regulars.

"The pies are excellent. The coffee is good, and it has this sort of homey feel," Sondre Soltad said.

Customers say the feel is similar to the fictional bar in the show Cheers.

Now, friends and loyal customers are showing Daly how much they care.

"I'm so very lucky," she said.

Daly was diagnosed with breast cancer in June. She's 35 with no family history of the disease.

"I feel pretty good," she said.

She faces six months of chemotherapy.

"Every now and then in the middle of the night I wake up and go, 'nooo, why her?" Colleen Venable said.

Go Fund Me: Fight Breast Cancer And Save Daly Pie

Venable, a close friend of Daly's started a Go Fund Me page to help with living expenses over the next few months.

The goal is $34,000.

So far, it's raised more than half at nearly $19,000.

The money will also go toward hiring additional staff while she gets treatments.

"Not knowing every morning, how you're gonna feel, if you can come into work, it's just so stressful," a friend said.

Daly said she quit a stable job in marketing to pursue her baking passion. Her shop on Vanderbilt Ave has only been there for 16 months.

"I'm very much in that newbie territory of small business when it's the make or break time," she said.

Friends and people in the neighborhood hope the money they donate will keep Daly in business and thriving during the busy fall season.

She said she's touched by all the support.

"It's overwhelming in a nice way," she said.

Her fans are confident she'll have a full, sweet life ahead.

The shop makes a watermelon based pie that they might rename the 'pink ribbon pie.' All proceeds from sales will go toward breast cancer research.

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