By Jena Carr
Four men from Portarlington have started their engines and hit the road to raise awareness and fight Motor Neurone Disease (MND).
Team Monica Hayes’ Mick Doyle, Greg Hughes, Darren Hellmann and Geoff Fary participated in FightMND’s Daniher’s Drive, an event that travels through many regions from October 12 to 15 to raise awareness for MND.
Mr Fary said the team were doing the drive in honour of his wife Monica, who died from MND in 2016 and would be taking her trusty old Subaru on the road in her memory.
“Monica was well known as a community activist and this dreadful disease, if you had to imagine the most awful possible disease you could, then it would be something like this,” he said.
“People are trapped inside their bodies, but their intellect remains intact, and they watch themselves slowly die. The disease robbed Monica of a third of her adult life.
“She was very stoic and very courageous. The day she died was the last day that she actually didn’t get out of bed, which speaks volumes.”
Mr Fary said the team was prepared for the drive and hoped there would be an “effective cocktail of treatments” in the future that would allow people to die with MND and not because of it.
“The drive is an enjoyable experience and a lot of the people who are on the drive are people who, similar to me, have been touched in one way or another by MND,” he said.
“Monica would have been absolutely gobsmacked and overjoyed to know that we’ve now raised more than $150,000 (over seven years) for MND research.”
To donate to Team Monica Hayes to raise money for MND research, visit danihers.fightmnd.org.au/team-monica-hayes
