Author Event: New Heart by Dion Perry

Join us as we welcome Dion Perry to discuss his powerful memoir, New Heart: One Man’s Journey of Being a Heart Transplant Recipient, a moving account of his battle with heart disease, the life-threatening challenges he faced, and his remarkable journey to receiving a new heart.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Dion’s doctor initially suspected he had asthma upon hearing he did not feel well, so he was sent to the local hospital for a chest X-ray and a lung function test. The results were definitive: He did not have asthma.

The mystery was solved when his doctor placed her fingers on his wrist to feel his pulse. She told him his heart was beating out of step before returning with a senior doctor, who gave him a referral to a cardiologist.

A few days later, the author was breathlessly trying to chainsaw up, split, and stack some wood from some logs he’d dropped in the yard a couple of months prior. Later that afternoon, not feeling well, he went to see an acupuncturist who wanted to take him straight to Goulburn Hospital. Instead, he went home, only to be phoned by a doctor who sent an ambulance to pick him up.

It was the beginning of a journey with lots of twists and turns that left him with a new heart more than two years later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dion Perry is an Australian who was born in Townsville, Queensland. He spent the first eight years of his life traveling around the eastern states of Australia before moving to Tasmania where he lived on the Furneaux Group Island, Clarke Island for six years. Having completed high school, he undertook a traineeship in pulp and papermaking at Australian Newsprint Mills at Boyer, near New Norfolk. Having moved to George Town in northern Tasmania, he worked for Comalco (Rio Tinto) at Bell Bay. For the next seven and a half years he worked as a potline operator, crane and forklift driver and heavy machinery operator.

Having left Comalco he completed a Bachelor of Arts in social science at the University of Tasmania at the Burnie and Hobart campuses. He is an author of speculative fiction, but he has also written about his life on Clarke Island, Island Life and about his heart transplant New heart. Following the heart transplant the anti-rejection drugs caused chronic kidney failure, Thrombotic Microangiopathy (TMA) and Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome (HUS). He undertakes haemodialysis three times a week at the Goulburn Renal Clinic.

On non-dialysis days, he works part-time as an author and also potters in his vegetable garden.