The Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) is an English based charity that supports sufferers of MND and their families, navigate through the challenging times following an initial diagnosis.

For my family, that was the time between my dad’s diagnosis in December 2019 through to dad’s death in April 2022. This timeframe sat perfectly over the Covid-19 pandemic March 2020 – March 2021, and thus my memory of lockdown is very different from that of many of my peers.

When everyone was celebrating the return to better and more optimistic times at the end ogf lockdown, we were entering tougher and tougher times as a family. Here I am now thinking back to March 2021 and I cannot remember the optimism filled days when past friendships were rekindled or indeed much about that time at all. I was just keeping on keeping on.

Dad was getting measurably more and more poorly and receiving about 18 hours per day of care at this point. Despite his life becoming less and less his own, he would continue to smile and delight all of the people who came to see him. Even with changing his diet dramatically, practising Qi Gong daily and trying out new nausea inducing medicines, nothing was reversing or even stabilising the progression of his deterioration.

Yes the beginning of March 2021 was a tough time for us all in the household as we’d lost hope for a miraculous recovery and were determined to spend the remaining time we had with Dad the best we could.

I dug deep, I focussed on work, playing my tuba and piano and gardening and chatting with Dad. I tried talking to a doctor and the doctor helplessly asked me, “Well what do you want me to do?” mirroring my helplessness – I avoided counselling knowing it would bring little comfort as the problem was highly intractable. My mum and sister’s were similarly affected.

Yet the discomfort for me was nothing compared to my dad. An active mind trapped in a failing body. The MNDA provided support for all of us by enabling us to talk with trained professionals who were knowledgable about the disease’s progression an unwavering voice and bedrock to fall uponm although admittedly hampered by the onset of Covid.

In many ways, we were fortunate as we had the five of us as a family to support each other, and yet there must be people for whom this support network does not exist, and yet it was the greatest test out family has had to undergo, and the negative effects of those harrowing years will continue to haunt us.

And so it is for all current and future sufferers of MND to whom I hope this fundraising effort benefits, and particularly for those whose default support network is diminished and so will rely extremely heavily on the MNDA.

If you would like to consider sponsoring or supporting my walk through Britain, then you can make donations to the MNDA through my Just Giving Page here.

The MNDA actively recommend Just Giving as their fundraising platform of choice.