A north-east man is taking on six challenges to help fight the degenerative disease that caused his father’s death.
Callum MacDonald, who is from Mintlaw but now lives in Kingswells, lost his father to Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in August 2013.
The fast-acting terminal illness stops signals from the brain reaching the muscles and ultimately causes sufferers to lose the ability to walk, talk, eat, drink or breathe unaided.
Mr Macdonald’s father, John, was an operations director for a logistics company and previously a diver and submariner in the Royal Navy and died aged 57 after living with the condition for a year.
Mr MacDonald, 34, said: “My dad intermittently fell over as his foot would just ‘give out’ on occasion. This went on for a couple of months before his foot became sort of a club foot and his walking slowed down gradually.
“We coped as well as we could – my parents told me they struggled to tell me it was incurable and terminal.
“Naturally, this was horrible to take in and really quite difficult to understand.
“None of us had heard of MND before this.”
Mr MacDonald sen was forced to stop working as his symptoms worsened and his voice “became little more than a whisper”.
His son added: “His personality always shone through right to very near the end, he always had a joke and a smile for the carers that came into see him.”
Mr MacDonald jun has rallied several close friends to take on #JonnyMac2019, a series of six physical tests including climbing a Corbett, cycling the Formartine and Buchan Way, doing the Aberdeen Kiltwalk, climbing a Munro, walking the Speyside Way and completing the Great Glencoe Challenge to Ben Nevis.
He aims to raise £2,500 for the charity MND Scotland. More information is available at
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/cal-macdonald1