And I said the, the biggest thing was the fact that I wouldn’t have much time with my grandsons. They’re only 2 years old now. But I’ve had a year with them that I didn’t think I’d have. A cracking summer, and really got to know them, you know. And it’s that that I think is important. It’s not wasting what’s left. You know, it’s limited, is the way of talking about it. It’s not sort of terminal in terms of, ‘It’s tomorrow. Your life is limited. So make the best of what you’ve got with every day. And I say, we spent the summer, we had a wonderful summer, fortunately the weather was good. It was tripped up a bit by me having to go into hospital for a couple of weeks with these blood clots. But apart from that, we hammered it to death. You know, we, we went everywhere. Jan – I’m a fisherman and of course one thing you can’t do is, is get onto a riverbank, but my wife piles me in the car, gets the wheelchair out, wheels me over to the bank, parks me up, goes back and gets my tackle, helps me set the tackle up, and we spend the day fishing. You know, she reads a book and I sink some worms. And, you know, but it’s not giving up, it’s doing stuff, you know.

When I – many, many years ago, when my children were little, I built a fort for my nephew. And my two daughters never ever forgave me. And the one thing they insisted that, one wanted a farm for her son, and the other one wanted a fort identical to the fort I’d built for my nephew for my other son. And with the limitations on what I can do, we have made them those for Christmas this year. And what would normally take a day, or an hour, takes a day. What takes a day, takes two weeks to do. Because you’re very limited in terms of stamina as well as everything else. And you get on with it. We needed ramps for my wheelchairs and things, so we built them. I designed them. I’ve got a little workshop and I set the equipment up. I couldn’t use it, but my wife can for me. So I tell her what to do and she does it, and we built the ramps for ourselves, you know. And it’s being independent, you know. We could have had somebody do it or, you know, they would have come from the local, from the occupational therapist and done it. But it was so much more satisfaction in doing it yourself.

We don’t sort of talk about the illness and live with the illness every day. I don’t wake up every morning thinking, ‘I’ve got motor neurone disease. I’m dying. I wake up thinking, ‘What can I do today?’ you know, and make the best of each day as it comes, you know. Because one of the benefits, if you like, of knowing you have a terminal illness is you can plan. You know, when you don’t know what’s going to – I mean you can walk out and go under a bus. You know, I could probably outlive four or five people I know [laughs]. So there’s a positive side to it, whereby you can get your financial side sorted out. You can look at what you’re going to do with your property and your bits and pieces. You know, which favourite nephew is getting your cricket memorabilia and whos having your fishing tackle, because you’ve got two daughters, you know. And I’m lucky, I’ve got two grandsons. And the only really, I suppose, disappointing thing from our side, or my side, is the fact that I won’t be there in their more formative years. I have a lot of things that I do. I used to do carpentry, or still do, in real terms, I suppose. But those skills I won’t be able to teach now to them. I won’t be able to take them fishing and teach them fishing. Although they’ve both, I’ve bought them both fishing rods and reels and penknives, and all the things a granddad wants to buy his grandchildren. So why shouldn’t I? You know. So they’ll remember me. And in time to come their mums and dads will say, ‘This is off your Granddad [surname]’, you know. So you, you’ve got that opportunity and I think it’s a very positive opportunity. I think it also makes you reflect on your life and what you’ve achieved. And I’m happy. I’ve achieved a lot. Been round the world, I’ve had three careers, and I’ve got two smashing kids and two wonderful grandchildren. I mean, there’s not many people can say that, you know. So I think you have to look positively on what you’ve achieved and not negatively about how much time you’ve got left. Because none of us really know how long we’ve got left.

But I think the biggest motivation is trying to get people to accept it. If you embrace it, like I said before, then because you’ve embraced it you can then do something about it. You can go and talk to people who have been through it, share their experiences. The equipment that’s available to you is easier to get if you ask for it, rather than hide the fact that you’ve got it or not acknowledge the fact that you’ve got it. It’s, there are benefits that you can gain, monetary benefits, and other things as well. Because once you’ve accepted that you’ve got motor neurone, you need to start looking at the future. Because you’ve got a future, guys, you know. It’s, it’s not over today. You’ve got a future, and you’ve got to plan that future as best you can, you know. And my advice is, ‘Go on a bloody good holiday to start with. You know, as soon as you know you’ve got it, if you can afford it, go and have an holiday. Because it never gets better. I say to myself each morning when I get up, ‘This is the best I’m ever going to feel. So make the most of it today. Because tomorrow I’m going to feel a little bit worse. And you’ve got to do that, you know.

I’d fallen a number of times in, particularly at work, and people noticed that. And you sort of laugh it off, ‘Oh, there’s water on the floor’ or, you know, ‘I fell over something. But you’re the only one falling over, so it tends to point you out to people. But it’s, it’s how you communicate, particularly at work, with your colleagues, but most importantly with your company. You don’t know how they’re going to react. You feel very insecure in terms of your future. Just because you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness doesn’t mean all your bills are terminal. They carry on. You know, you’ve still got to live, you’ve still got to do the things that you’ve always done. Nobody comes charging out the sky with this thing that says, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll pay everything from now on. You’ve still got to earn a living, you’ve still got to make the decisions for that living. And I found it very, very traumatic in terms of when I communicated what was wrong with me to my company and my colleagues at work particularly. And deciding on it was, as I say, a very, very difficult decision. Fortunately you’re not put in the situation that if you do have to go sick for whatever reason and you can’t go to work that your GP will actually put down motor neurone disease. They will put down that, you know, you’ve got a, something wrong with your leg or whatever it might be, the outward sign, rather than communicate that you have a terminal illness. Fortunately I didn’t need that facility in real terms. But obviously I chose how I told my company and when I told my company.

What would have been your anxiety about if the GP had put motor neurone disease? What would that have meant?

Well, if the company had seen it and said, ‘Hang on, you’ve got a terminal illness’ you know, I don’t know how they would have reacted, you know. Would they have said, you know, ‘We’re going to terminate you from now sort of thing, or, ‘You…? And particularly when I was in a job that I loved, which was demonstrating motor vehicles. And you can’t demonstrate a motor vehicle if you can’t drive it. And of course I couldn’t drive. And I’d been doing things like training while this diagnosis had been going on, and I was training other people and I’d got other skills that the company could use.

And it’s amazing what can change you. It can be a simple remark, and you can be crying, and the tears will just stream down your face. You don’t know why in real terms. I mean you, it’s emotion, but it’s just been triggered by something, and it can be something really simple, you know. And with me it, it could be, somebody says, ‘Oh, I’m taking the lad to the match at the weekend’ you know. And suddenly you start crying because you – ‘I’m not going to be able to take somebody to the match at the weekend. [laughs] It’s actually bloody stupid. But it is, and especially where my grandsons are concerned it’s, I get very emotional that there are, our relationship can’t be what it is. I mean my brother came over, he lives up North, and he came down and one of my grandsons was here at the time he was here. And he picked him up and started swinging him. And I just burst into tears because I can never, I’ve never been able to do that to my grandson. And it, it’s so emotional that – just something like that, you know, and.

I don’t think it’s part of the condition that you become emotional. I think it’s a reaction to the condition. And, yes, I can be very laughable, and I’ll make jokes and – because that’s another defence against it. And you can get very surly as well. You know, ‘Don’t you realise that’s a disabled space?’ you know, ‘Parking your bloody car there. And it’s a reaction to it, you know. And you compensate for it, because you don’t want to happen what’s happening to you, and you compensate for it by either reacting emotionally, you know, because you can’t do things, you’re not going to be able to do things. I went out and bought everything I’d ever want to give my grandsons, and went and bought it in a day, you know. They got stuff that’s going to last until they’re bloody teenagers [coughs] that I would have bought, because that’s part of what granddads did for boys. And I’m not going to be there, you know.

Fishing rods, knives, all sorts of things, you know, cranky stuff. But it’s a reaction to it. And it’s worse at the beginning. When you’re first told, you, you think somebody’s just told you you’re going to die Saturday. You know, ‘It’s Friday night now, so Saturday you’re not going to be here. End of story, you know – don’t need to think any further than that. And of course it’s not. You are going to be around for a while, you know. Nobody can tell you how long, or they won’t tell you how long, I’m not sure which. Probably because they don’t. The disease affects people in different ways, it’s not all the same for everybody. And again, I think part of that is how your make-up is. If you’re a fighter you’re going to last longer than somebody that gives in to it or somebody that refuses to accept it. And I think that’s one of the big things. Accept it, embrace it. Once you’ve done that – and that’s hard, it really is hard. I found it very difficult. But once I’d embraced the fact that I’d got it, I could then start compensating for it, with equipment.

But certainly the means-tested part of it I think is unfair. And I say it’s unfair for two reasons. One, we probably contribute more as higher wage-earners than other people. So we get a double whammy because we’ve paid more during our life contributing. And I don’t resent that. But the other thing is, because we’re on a terminal illness, all the pensions we’ve accrued through our life we now have to take, because we’re only going to be here for another year or so. So it’s pointless them sitting there and actually going to waste in real terms. So the only form that you can take it in is the biggest lump sum that you can get and the smallest pension. Because, you know, that’s the way you’re going to maximise the benefits from your lifetime of, of devotion to your old age. And of course immediately you do that, you put yourself out of every allowance that God ever gave you in terms of things. So if I had no money, I could have a wet room. But because I’ve got money, I have a chairlift, a bath lift to get me in and out the bath. And we struggle, you know. And it’s that sort of thing. So it’s a double whammy in real terms.

What are the other means-tested things that you?

The other means-tested things that you come up against are allowances and, etcetera, living allowances and things like that. Anything that requires you to be below – because I get pensions then I’m not entitled to those sorts of things, and what have you. But it’s all right, you know, you can sit there and probably people listen to you and say, ‘Well, he’s only got a year to live. What’s he bloody worried about?’ My wife’s going to be here for another thirty years. You know, that money’s hers, and she’s got to live on that money for the next thirty years. You know, that’s our future, not my future – our future, and it was always deemed to be our future. And I can’t waste it, you know, because I’m coming, you know, in the last sort of year or so of, of what I’ve got.

What about equipment and so on? Have you had to pay for other bits of equipment yourself? Or have they been provided?

General equipment that looks after me within the confines of the house has been provided, which is very good. No fault there, brilliant. In terms of mobility, I have a Motability car. I bought a scooter, the electric scooter things, off the Internet second-hand. And I got a wheelchair that we bought from Argos, which is the best place to go for them. They’re brilliant quality and ‘200 cheaper than anywhere else. Go to Argos. And I was told that by a girl at the Motability shop, and I won’t say who [laughs]. But brilliant value. We wanted a, a lightweight wheelchair that my wife could manage, particularly as we were going abroad, that we could take on the plane and what have you. And we went to Argos and got it on recommendation. Absolutely superb. They do a wonderful range of disability products. So look in your Argos catalogue.

I never knew that. That’s amazing.

No. It’s phenomenal, the products they do and, and the value. You, I mean if you go to – one of the things I, I found was that, not everywhere, but the majority of places selling disability products, particularly on the Internet, which is where you would get the widest choice, they never tell you what the price is. Every time we’ve rung up for a quote for something, the first question they ask me is, ‘Do you have a whatsit, a grant?’ or whatever it is, you know. ‘No, I’m paying for it myself. And the price immediately rockets, because you go outside of the two and a half or three thousand, or whatever it is might be, the, the grant situation for something. I mean we started with a, a wet room, that was ‘800 for the tray and the sides. To install it in my bathroom, by the time we’d finished, was £6,000. You know, we had no comprehension. Obviously we, we can’t afford that sort of money, to go ahead. But that’s the sort of thing. If you go and look on the Internet for a, a chair, or a scooter, you will get a price that is their recommended retail price, which is far away and above, but mostly no prices at all. Contact us. Then they look at your background, the registration number of your car, what sort of house you live in, you know. And I, I honestly, that’s my honest belief, that it’s priced according to your ability to pay, not to the product. And I think the more Argoses that get involved will bring the price down. And I’ve even seen it on shopping channels on the television that they do similar products. Because it’s so expensive to be disabled.

But as I say, I was quite fortunate that the company said I could choose my time of leaving. And I chose – because you certainly don’t want to go to the bitter end, and I say that because I could probably have done another month over what I did. But if I’d have done that month, that month of, really, low quality mobility was spent with my wife and it meant that we had a little bit of quality life and a little bit of retirement before we became carer and patient, which was very important, because we have a tremendous relationship. It’s not just the fact that we’re married. It’s the fact that we love each other obviously, but we are each other’s best friends. We’ve always done things together through our life. My interests and her interests are different, but we’ve always joined in with each other’s interests. And I’ve carted her off to trade shows and motor shows and tool shows and events. And I’ve been round cathedrals and looked at bits of ancient stone every there and everywhere. And it’s those sorts of things that build that relationship. And without that I think it would be difficult. Because we can still spend time together. Although we can’t go out as much as we used to, we can still go on the Internet and look at things that are going on in our various spheres of interest and share them with each other still. And she insists that I go out pretty much every day. So I have to get myself up and I have to – not myself, but she gets me up and gets me out. And we go shopping and do all the things that normal people do. It just means it’s a lot more work for her. But I don’t feel I’m left out of anything within that. And we still do the things we enjoy, providing obviously there’s accessibility for wheelchairs and things.

Ha, do you think it’s changed your relationship together in any way?

Very much so. I think it’s brought us together more. Although we were very close, it’s certainly brought us together. The reliability on her and the responsibility on her has changed dramatically. Where I would have been, if you like, in the old-fashioned term head of the household, now she’s the head of the household and really is having to make, the decisions that we would have either made jointly or I would have made she now makes independently. Because I can’t be with her all the time, and because I’m trying to transfer ownership to her so that it doesn’t come as a shock at the end. So the, you know, things like where our money is, where the pensions are, and all those financial sides of things we’ve transferred across. The decision-making on things in the house in terms of decorating or choosing things are, are becoming more Janet’s than joint. And she’s very uncomfortable with it at times. So it’s a transition thing, it’s not sort of just a, a wall if you like goes up. It’s got to be a transition, you’ve got to start doing it and getting the other person used to, you know, taking those things and the changing role. And, yes, you do become somewhat of a child in terms of the relationship, because obviously as you progress so the care becomes more intimate in terms of your needs. And you have to be comfortable with that, both of you have to be comfortable with that, and the fact that that is going to progress. And again it’s a vulnerable thing, you know.

But I felt very vulnerable that once they knew I wasn’t going to get better – because obviously there’s a short-term scenario where, ‘Yes, you, you know, we’re going to look after you for a couple of months. You go and have an operation, you come back, and [snaps fingers] off we go again. And of course that wasn’t going to happen. I was never ever going to come back again from an operation, because there would be no operation. I would just get progressively worse. So it was very, very worrying. And it got to the point where obviously I needed to tell somebody, and I spoke to my immediate boss about the situation, and he was extremely understanding. And we went, and he arranged a meeting for us to see Personnel, and the company was absolutely brilliant in my case. I mean, it might not happen for everybody. But certainly because I’d got other skills I could call upon from previous careers, I was able to become deskbound, if you like, take over a computer and start running another bit of the company and, and doing things there.

So this was the point at which you told them that it was motor neurone?

It was the point at which I told them. And again, it was fairly traumatic when you’re telling them, because these are people you’ve worked with, know you, and there are a lot of friends, in real terms. And it’s very emotional again, that the things that you’ve done and are going to do have that impact on that situation. And again, you’re becoming vulnerable, you know, because you’re having to open up to people and tell them things, and you feel very vulnerable when you’re doing it. And of course once you’ve told the company, you’ve got to tell your colleagues. And they take it differently.

And again there were sort of three sorts of reaction. Unclean, ‘I don’t want to catch it, so [coughs] I’m going to stay away from him. Over-reaction in terms of sympathy. And then fortunately for me I worked with a lot of heavy goods vehicle drivers, who have a tremendous sense of humour. And it was just business as usual. And that did me the world of good, because they kept me straight, they kept me narrow. And that’s what you want. It’s business as usual. You don’t want people to make exceptions for you, particularly – I didn’t.

I mean, my driving was everything to me. One, I couldn’t go to work unless I drove. And legally, when you are diagnosed you must inform the DVLA, and write to the DVLA and tell them what your disease is. They send you back a pack, then, that you have to read through and fill in, and you have to describe your disability. In my case it was my right leg. I’d lost quite a lot of use out of my right leg at that time, although I was still sort of mobile and not wheelchair-bound or anything. This was right at the, when you’re diagnosed. And I was terrified because it was my manly, macho image was about driving, you know. You drove, nobody drove me. I drove. And I really wanted to keep driving. So rather than wait for things to happen, I filled in the appropriate forms for the DVLA describing what was wrong with me and sent them off, and then went on the Internet and found that Mobility, actually you could book a test with them and they would assess your ability to drive. They would then take you out in various cars to overcome your disability. So in the course of, I think, it was about two hours that we did a, an assessment of my physical capabilities.

We then went out, and they had me driving a normal car, if you like, but this car was actually fitted with all sorts of extras. So once they’d established where I was in terms of driving a normal car, we then changed it to a hand accelerator and brake. We then changed it to a left-handed accelerator pedal with an automatic transmission, which is what I ended up with. That’s what I needed, because my left leg was still okay but my right leg was shutting down. So I had my car modified so that I could drive with an automatic with a left-hand accelerator. But that wasn’t immediately. Obviously I had the assessment done, then I got the results of the assessment back and forwarded it to the DVLA. So the DVLA, rather than having to go to my consultant or doctor, who, I didn’t know whether they would say, ‘No, he can’t drive any more’ and that would be it without a licence, and that would have terrified me, or they would say, ‘No, he’s okay. You don’t know. So I actually pre-empted it by having the assessment done. And I knew what was in the assessment, so I was quite happy to forward that to the DVLA. And I paid for it myself, it cost me ’80 to have done.

The DVLA, because it comes from an accredited source that they’re used to seeing, accepted that, that I could carry on driving, providing I altered my licence to one that was an adapted accelerator on an automatic vehicle. And that’s what my licence now reads, that I can drive a, a vehicle, providing it is an automatic with an adapted accelerator. And the adapted accelerator can either be hand-operated or foot-operated. I then had my car modified so that it’s got now two accelerator pedals, although you wouldn’t notice it. And when my wife drives, it’s like a normal automatic. You’ve got the brake pedal in the middle and the accelerator on the right-hand side. When I drive, we, there’s another accelerator pedal, which is under the dash. You push that down. If you push that one down, the other one goes up, so you haven’t got two accelerator pedals sort of in the floor pan, and then I can drive the car. And then when I’ve finished driving it and she wants to drive it, she just pushes her pedal down and the other one goes up out the way. A tremendous thing. But you don’t know these things are available unless you make an effort to actually go out and find them.

And that kept me driving. And it’s absolutely wonderful, because it gives you your independence. I’m pushed around in wheelchairs, I’m on sticks and what have you to move, and move about, but when I sit in that driving seat, because I can still, my left leg is still reasonably good and I’ve still got the necessary movement, I’m as good as everybody else. I can still drive safely and I’ve still got that independence there. And that’s important. It’s all about quality, it’s about independence and I suppose about vulnerability. You know, it stops you being vulnerable again. Because I work in the country, it means that I would have had to, if I wanted to continue working at that time, I would have had to have people take me to work and bring me home. Because of – yes, there’s a bus service, but it’s once every two hours, you know, which is no good for going to, to work and coming back from work. And it gives you that independence, you can still be – and as I say, it really makes the difference in your life, because I’ve driven all my life. Driving was a massive part of it in the latter years, when I gave up real employment as I call it, and sort of took a step back from business. And I, I had a wonderful job, a job that, you know, it was more hobby than, than work, although I got paid for it, which was demonstrating very expensive motor cars to people and taking them through the latest technology. Because I’ve always been interested in it, it was not a hardship. It, it’s, you know, my interest. It’s like having a hobby and doing it for a living. So it, you know, it’s all those things that, that make it really worthwhile.

You don’t take it in, you don’t know, when somebody tells you you’ve got a terminal illness, you don’t know what questions you want to ask, you don’t know at that moment in time how you’re going to cope with it. And it’s only when you’ve come away and you’ve, you’ve looked in each other’s eyes and cried and all those sorts of things. And I’d like to see at least minimum – or maximum a week – probably a minimum of four days but certainly a maximum of seven days from being told that you’ve got a terminal illness to seeing again either the guy that told you, or the guy you’ve been referred to. Any longer than that I think is, it’s outlandish, because you start to worry, really, really worry. You don’t know what’s happening to you. You don’t, you know that it’s there and things. And because it’s motor neurone it’s unlike cancer or something like that where there’s a lot of pain involved and a lot of therapies and things and stuff they can do. There isn’t that much you need to see professionals for. It, it’s basically just peace of mind, as much as anything. It, it’s being told what’s likely to happen, what’s, where you are with the disease, and all the rest of it. And answer your questions, ‘How long have I got to live? you know. How long before I can’t walk? How long before I need a respirator? How long?’ you know. Because by that time you’ve been on the Internet, you know what’s wrong with you, you’ve looked in your medical dictionary or whatever it might be that your reference is, and you’ve formulated the things you want to know. ‘How do I cope financially when I can’t work any more? Where do I get equipment from? Who do I talk to? Who do I need to register with?’ you know, are all things that come up. But they don’t come up until you’ve had that initial meeting to be told you’re terminally ill. But you really want to talk to somebody within a, a week, I would say. Fortnight tops, but certainly no more than a fortnight. And I would say a week. A week is, is enough time for you to get your head round, you know, the immediate questions you want to ask and what care’s there for you. As I say with motor neurone we’re very lucky inasmuch that the Association in a lot of areas actually provide a nurse that you can focus through. And she’s not a National Health nurse. She’s fully qualified, but she’s specifically paid for by the Association to look after the patients in that area. And you can always get her on her mobile. She’ll ring you. You can’t go directly to her, but she has a messaging service and you leave your, your number and she rings you back. And I’m fortunate. The one we have is absolutely brilliant.

So get involved with the programme, and try and accept it. Because once you’ve got that acceptance, then you can start planning. And you don’t have to get too, I haven’t got clinical with it. We take it one stage at a time. As I deteriorate to that level, so we make the decisions associated with that level.

So it’s not, you know, planning from now until, you know, I’m lying in a bed totally paralysed with somebody working me on a respirator or something, you know. Leave it, just concentrate on today, but accept the fact that you’ve got to live today, and become involved. Get involved with the Motor Neurone Association. A tremendous amount of goodwill and support comes from that, knowledge. The people in it are people who have nursed people whove suffered from motor neurone disease, and then carried on to become visitors of the association. It could be parents or loved ones that they’ve lost, but they want to put something back through the association. There’s a tremendous amount of support there. And if you go to carers’ meetings it’s not about medical – it’s about fun, it’s about how you enjoy yourself, making sure, you know, nice relaxing massage, you know, all sorts of things. You know, knowledge. You’re not on your own. Other people have been there. Why travel the same road and map it out when somebody’s already been down it and made it a motorway? So, you know, you can whip down, you can bypass all the hurdles, because people have already done them for you. And then you can start finding hurdles further down that you can attack and, and progress on with.

But I would advise people really to get involved, you know, get out there, find out what’s available both in your local community – we’re members of the local carers’ association, we’re members of the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Oxford branch of the carers’ association, and we get involved in everything that we can, because it helps certainly me come to terms with what’s going on within me. Secondly I can feel that I’m helping other people as well as myself. And it gives Janet the fact that – my wife – that she’s not isolated. There are people she can turn to, people she can talk to that understand and know what, what she’s going through. And that’s very important.

And as I say, if I sort of sum up with anything it would be, ‘Get involved, embrace it, get involved, become members of the carers’ associations. They’re so much help, they really are. And I’ve never belonged to anything like that in my life, neither has Janet. We’ve always gone our own way and done our own thing. But on this you need help, you can’t cope with it on your own. It’s too big. There’s too many things that you need, and you need to know about. And if you try to do it independently you’ll miss out on so much.

I first noticed it probably eighteen months to two years before I was diagnosed. And what it was, I started to lose feeling in my legs if I did exercise. If I walked for a reasonable period or length then my legs would start to go numb. And at that time I smoked. So I went to the doctor’s and the usual thing happened, ‘Oh, you’re a smoker. So it’s, you know, your arteries are furring up and seizing up. So they sent me to see a specialist who dealt with that area. And of course the National Health being the National Health, it was four months to get an appointment, and then four months to have some tests done, and then another three months before he saw me to say what the test results were. So it was virtually a year to find out there was nothing wrong with me in terms of that side of my physiology. And what happened then was, I was out working and I fell over my foot, because it, I limped a little bit, and I fell over my foot and broke my rib. And went to see my GP after I’d been to the hospital with it, because obviously I couldn’t work, and explained what had gone on before. And he said, ‘Well, how did you do it?’ And I told him. And he said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing to do with that. That’s neurological. I’ll get you to see a neurologist. So he sent me to see a specialist in that field. And again it was the normal sequence of timings et cetera, and they then carried out some tests on me. And of course motor neurone is not testable. What they test for is everything that they can cure. And what you’re left with, if they can’t find anything there, is motor neurone. So we went through all the tests. I went in and had a scan done. They then did what I call the torture chamber, which is where they put electric needles in and what have you to see what your muscles responses are and so on. They did that again to me to finalise it. At that point I think they were fairly certain that it was motor neurone.

Obviously we were concerned at that point that it was something more serious than we originally thought about. And we’d looked on the Internet independently, putting the symptoms in, and coming up with completely the wrong answers, and probably frightening ourselves more than anything else. But all independently, because we, we couldn’t even talk about it, my partner and I, in terms of what it might be. The specialist, as I said, dealt with it extremely well. We were his last appointment of the day, so we could spend as much time as we wanted with him, which was really nice because there was no pressure on either side, for us to go or for him to need us to go for the next patient. And he explained that we were his last appointment, ‘So just take your time’ and what have you. But of course you can’t think of anything. Somebody’s just told you that you have a terminal illness. What do you think about? All that you see is the terminal illness. You don’t see anything else. So you’re trying to come to terms with it, and you can’t think of what to ask or what questions you want answered. What I was told was that there was a specialist at the hospital in that department that dealt specifically with motor neurone, and he would transfer me to that specialist, because he was the best guy in the field in terms of it. And he is. And he’s extremely good.

The problem was, whether I fell through the, the paperwork or not, I don’t know, but I was expecting to be seen by him within a fortnight of that meeting. After two months I still hadn’t heard anything. And after two months of being told you’re terminally ill and nobody speaking to you, we just didn’t know what to do. We’d gone through crying, through, not, I couldn’t cope with anything that was more than a fortnight away. Nobody could sort of plan that in three weeks’ time we’d go down to [daughter’s] or up to [other daughter’s] or whatever it might be. It was, ‘Don’t want to know. I’m not going to be here in three weeks. I’m terminally ill. Can’t you understand that?’ you know. And you become very whatsit. And literally I was in panic mode, because I had nobody I could contact, nobody I could talk to, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I went on the Internet and found the Motor Neurone Disease Association, rang their helpline, and within 24 hours I’d seen a specialist, I’d seen my motor neurone disease nurse in my local hospital, and all was well.

When we sat down and went through after he examined me, the whole of the interview was taped, so that I could take it away with me to refer to. Any questions we had were answered honestly. We were able then to start coming to terms with it a lot better. And I felt I had something of a future. Because one of the questions I asked, obviously, like all people whove been told they’ve got a terminal illness, is, ‘How long have I got?’ And of course nobody will tell you because they’re not sure how long you’ve got because they’re all different. But he did tell me I could book a holiday this year. So that was sort of positive, and that was a very good thing. So we came away from that with a) the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one in the world, that there was an organisation that I could turn to that could help me, that the professionals in my area were extremely good in what they did. And this feeling of the end of the world having descended upon us didn’t go away – I mean it was still there – but we were able to cope with it so much better in terms of it.

Have you ever had any thoughts about what might have caused it in your case?

I don’t know. I can’t think of any specific thing that you could ally it to. I suppose you could say giving up smoking, maybe, but I wouldn’t have thought so. One thing I’m very proud of is when I was told I was dying I didn’t go back to smoking. I’ve kept a clean sheet. And my nurse at our practice, who was my conscience when I gave up smoking – I did it through her, and the patches and things – holds me up as a glowing example. But I gave up smoking because everybody needs a reason, and my reason for giving up smoking wasn’t health, or my health, it was the health of my grandchildren. And I promised my daughters that on no way I would ever smoke in front of them while they were pregnant or my grandchildren. So I gave up when I knew they were pregnant. And I haven’t had a cigarette since. And that was the 3rd of September 2004. So two years.

Engraved on your memory.

Two years in now [laughs]. Well, it is, it’s a big thing. I smoked forty a day and I’d smoked since I was 10 years old in reality. So, you know, fifty years of smoking pretty much. But I do feel better for it [laughs]. But, yeah, that’s the only thing. No, I don’t, I don’t think there was, you know, I wouldn’t say there was anything that I would say was the cause of it. There’s nothing there. I think everybody tries to find something and invent something. And in, part of the discussions with my specialist was that, you know, ‘You might think, you know, this caused it or that’s caused, but we don’t know, you know, we just don’t know. We don’t know whether it’s hereditary. Footballers predominant in motor neurone, a lot of footballers are affected by it. And yet it can affect anybody, you know. I think the nicest thing that was said was that, ‘It’s not something you’ve done. You haven’t done anything to cause this. If I’d have got cancer then I could have said, ‘Yeah, well, it’s my smoking, you know. I deserve it, you know. I shouldn’t have smoked all them fags, thrown all that money away in smoke. I jolly well deserve it. But you can’t, because you don’t know, you know. You haven’t done anything to deserve it. And it’s no use turning round and saying, ‘God, what have I done to deserve this?’ or anything else. You’ve got it.

I think one of the things that is a strength to me, and has been throughout my life, is that I have had the ability to say, when I have a problem, ‘Can I do something about it? Yes. Not a problem then. I can cure it. I can go out and do something positive to get rid of it or diminish it. Can I do something about it? No. Well, why worry? you know. It’s not going to get me anywhere. And I’ve lived my life with that belief. It’s very difficult [laughs] not to worry, but I’ve actually lived it with that. And with motor neurone, ‘Can I do something about it? Yes, I can. I can go and be part of the trials. I can do this. I can do positive things. I can raise money. You know, I have lots of skills I can use to help motor neurone disease, and, and be positive about it. Can I do anything about curing it? No. You know.