John Dinon has lived with motor neurone disease for almost a third of his life, making him one of the longest-surviving people with the progressive condition in Australia. The Queensland grandfather celebrated his 90th birthday last month, a milestone that both he and his wife, Johanna, once thought was out of reach. He did not think he would last that long, she said, and neither did she.
The diagnosis, on 27 February 1997, came as a shock when he was 61. The first sign had appeared two years earlier as slurred speech, noticed while the couple were visiting family, which Johanna initially mistook for the effects of drink. Now managing difficulty with his speech, Mr Dinon uses a whiteboard to communicate, and still recalls the exact date he was told he had the condition and given roughly two to five years to live.
Specialists say the story is unusual. A director of care services at the state’s MND association described the disease as one of the worst, noting that its cause is unknown in about 90 percent of cases and that people live, on average, a little over two years after diagnosis. She called Mr Dinon’s survival remarkable, adding that there was no clear explanation for it, and that if there were, it would have been bottled and shared.
His long life has been shared with Johanna for almost 66 years. The couple, who married in 1960, met in a small South Australian town where he was the local butcher and she a weekly customer. After a colleague proved too shy to ask her out, Mr Dinon stepped in, and the pair went on to raise two children, moving to Queensland in 1976 and later welcoming two grandchildren.
For the past 17 years the couple have lived at a not-for-profit aged-care centre on the Sunshine Coast, where Mr Dinon is known as the resident postie, delivering mail and parcels to neighbours each day, rain excepted, and greeting their dogs along the way. Fellow residents say they are amazed by his reliability. To mark his birthday, staff and loved ones threw him a party, and his most cherished moment was the group photo. His motto through life, he wrote on his whiteboard, has been to never give up.
