Christina Applegate has opened up about the heartbreaking reality of life with multiple sclerosis (MS).
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The Married… With Children star, 52, was diagnosed with the chronic condition in 2021, having experienced symptoms for several years prior.
MS is a condition that affects the brain and spinal cord and which can not currently be cured, though medication can help manage the symptoms.
Symptoms can include issues with vision and coordination, extreme fatigue, numbness, tingling, muscle pains and spasms, and problems with controlling the bladder.
Christina has been open about her own struggles with the condition, and admitted that it leaves her “screaming” in pain in bed.
Speaking on the MesSy podcast, which she hosts alongside Sopranos actor Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS, Christina revealed: “I lay in bed screaming.
“Jamie and I have different — everybody has different ways of it showing up. I lay in bed screaming. Like, the sharp pains, the ache, that squeezing.”
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On the episode, the pair also interviewed Rory Kandel, the founder of California bakery Rory’s Bakehouse, who also has MS.
Rory revealed that her symptoms mainly “manifest in pain” which she compared to “knives in your spine”, which sometimes leaves her unable to move around.
When she then asked the hosts if they ever “feel like that”, Christina responded: “Every single day of my life.”
She revealed: “I can’t even pick up my phone sometimes, because now it’s traveled into my hands.
“So I’ll try to go get my phone, or get my remote to turn on the TV [and] sometimes, I can’t even hold them. I can’t open bottles now.”
Christina described it as “the beauty of invisible diseases”, as people living with MS can outwardly appear healthy to observers while dealing with many hidden battles.
She added: “Jamie knows that I just lay in bed all the time. I mean, I worked for almost 50 years, so I’m kind of okay with it.
“But if I put my feet on the ground and they’re hurting like extraordinarily bad to the touch, I was like, ‘Yep. Gonna get back in my bed and pee in my diaper because I don’t feel like walking all the way to the damn bathroom.’”
Christina then clarified: “I actually don’t lay here and pee in my diaper. That’s just a joke. But it’s so freaking painful and so hard and so awkward.”
She previously told Good Morning America that she’d first noticed tiny symptoms up to seven years before her eventual diagnosis.
“My symptoms had started in the early part of 2021, and it was, like, literally just tingling on my toes.
“And by the time we started shooting in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair. Like, I couldn’t walk that far.”
She then explained how that turned into her legs fully giving way under her, which led her to believe she had the disease years before it was diagnosed by a professional.
“I really just kind of put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather. And then nothing would happen for, like, months, and I didn’t pay attention,” she continued.
She also stated that even though she’s in “excruciating pain”, she’s “used to it now.”
“Right now, I’m isolating. That’s kind of how I’m dealing with it, is by, like, not going anywhere, because I don’t want to do it. It’s hard,” she added.
