Ailsa explains what it is like facing progressive MS and hopes the new Octopus trial can help her.
"I was playing a game of ultimate frisbee and got fuzzy vision in one eye - a bit like looking through a steamed-up windscreen.""The doctor said it was optic neuritis, so I had steroid treatment, and the blurring went away. So I got on with being a student."
"But I was 24, all my friends were meeting up at the pub that evening, and so for me, it was a really big thing to take in. Even if having milder MS was good, as the neurologist saw it, for me being diagnosed with MS was not.""At the time, I found it quite hard to talk to friends about it because they were either so worried about me that I ended up telling them I was totally fine, or they just didn't know very much about MS," Ailsa recalls.
The Octopus trial - so-called because it is a multi-arm, multi-stage trial - is being run by Prof Jeremy Chataway, from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery UCLH in London, with £13m in funding from the UK's MS Society.Existing trial patients who prove to be on ineffective drugs can swap to a new arm, and are allowed to continue any other MS disease-modifying drugs they may already be taking.
He thinks MS patients should eventually be able to take disease-modifying drugs to deal with the inflammatory component of MS and add on any remyelinating drugs that prove to help repair or even stop nerve damage. After a brain scan, blood tests and a thorough neurological examination, she has now received her first dose of trial medication.
"At the beginning, things were fairly normal. But now we have to plan a bit more, and take the right equipment. It limits the scope of what you can do, so sport or dancing aren't options any more. The biggest impact is the things that MS takes away from you," he says. "I think it's important to be really open with the children, so they understand MS and the impact in their own way," she says.