A MULTIPLE sclerosis sufferer from Inverness is preparing to undergo a cutting edge stem cell therapy in Mexico after raising more than £50,000 in just six weeks.

Rona Tynan, a retired Metropolitan police sergeant and mother-of-two, said she had been overwhelmed by the generosity of friends, family and even strangers after her plight was highlighted by the Herald in July.

Ms Tynan is confined to a wheelchair as a result of secondary progressive MS and feared that unless she could raise the funds needed by the end of August, her condition would become too severe too qualify for the potentially life-changing procedure.

However, she revealed that she and her husband Mick have now booked flights to Mexico after raising £55,000 of their £60,000 target. The couple will fly from Inverness to Mexico City on October 5 and Ms Tynan hopes to be ready to begin treatment, known as AHSCT (autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation), at Clinica Ruiz in Puebla the following week.

She said: "I start tests on October 9. You have a week of tests - bloods, MRI, heart checks, a full MOT from head to toe - which I just hope I get through. If I don't it's back to the drawing board, and they'd have to give me another date. If there's the slightest thing wrong, they can't go ahead because you will die if you have the treatment and you're not ready for it."

AHSCT uses chemotherapy to strip out MS patients' faulty immune systems before "rebooting" it with a transplant of stem cells harvested from their own bone marrow. Although the treatment has been available overseas for decades, it has never been routinely available on the NHS and is considered unproven by many neurologists. However, some sufferers - including Mrs Tynan's neighbour and fellow MS patient, Lucy Clarke - credit it with reversing their symptoms and halting the progress of the disease.

Mrs Tynan said she had been bowled over by people's kindness during her fundraising bid, including a local timber businessman who gifted £10,000 after a chance meeting at lunch and donations from as far afield as Australia and Spain.

Mrs Tynan added: "One lady, who doesn't even know me, sent me £722 in an envelope. There was a £500 cheque in it from some wealthy man - she was cleaning for him and she told him about me and he just wrote a cheque out and said 'can you give this to that girl'. And she had raised £222 from doing a bake sale with her children. She wrote this lovely letter to me about how it's better to give, and that's what she taught her children.

"Then there have been all anonymous donations and a Herald reader wrote me a letter with £100 in it saying she had been following the story. I thought that was lovely. I really am so grateful and thankful."

Mrs Tynan added that while the gravity of the procedure was starting to "hit home", she wanted to highlight the promise of AHSCT for those who cannot afford it.

AHSCT is currently being tested in clinical trials in Sheffield and London, but NHS England has also paid for a small number of patients to undergo the therapy "off-trial" on the health service. It is not available in Scotland.

Mrs Tynan said: "Hundreds of people who are not in my position who would love to get this done and they're just never going to be able to raise this money because they don't have the energy or the support network.

"My heart breaks for those people. It's a lottery of who's got money and who hasn't, and that makes me feel very sad to think there's people rotting behind closed doors now who probably feel quite upset reading about it because they can't get their hands on it.

"These are the kinds of people we need to target and help."