Amy and I met at university way back when digital cameras in clubs were a thing. While we've spent countless hours walking up and down the high street over the years, until last week, we weren't 100% sure what a 'fell' was...

So why are we taking on the infamous 10 in 10?

My mum, Sharon, lived with secondary progressive MS. Diagnosed in the 90s she was told by a straight-talking neurologist there was nothing he could do for her. The same man, sat at the same desk, told her that very same thing every year for 21 years. So she went from walking, to using a stick, to needing crutches, to losing her mobility completely. She lost the ability to swallow, her independence and then thanks to a rogue bout of breast cancer, her life at 60.

What she was never given was any hope that her MS wasn’t going to get worse and that someday there could be a treatment that would help. And it’s this hope, in the shape of blue sparkly tablets, perfectly bottled in a white pill pot, that I watched being handed out to Ailsa at Queen Square hospital by leading neurologist Dr Jeremy Chataway as part of the Octopus trial last month.

Ailsa, a wonderfully positive mum-of-three, who at 47-years-old last year was told her MS had progressed. Up until then she’d had a few disease modifying treatments (DMTs), but 12 months ago she found herself in limbo – the same lifelong limbo my mum and tens of thousands of other people with MS face at one point or another.

But the opening of Octopus – the revolutionary multi-arm, multi-stage trial – is another reminder to us all just how far MS research has come. It’s incredible to think that in the last two decades we’ve developed treatments that can make a huge difference to how people live with MS.

And now? The trial won’t close until we stop MS once and for all. We just need to make sure we keep it funded...

Pennies, pounds, cheques (?!) - anything you can spare would be much-appreciated. We promise not to go shopping with it!

Sam