Years before she was formally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Christina Applegate disclosed a little symptom that she had that initially indicated the disease.
The 53-year-old actress, who is arguably best remembered for her parts in Married… with Children and Dead to Me, came out as having multiple sclerosis in 2021 after receiving a diagnosis a few months before.
She had difficulties while filming the third and final season of Dead To Me because of the effects of the disease, which is a chronic condition that affects the central nervous system.
She had disregarded the “tiny” symptoms of the illness for seven years prior to receiving a diagnosis, but she has subsequently disclosed them.
The actress and her longtime friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who is also battling the illness, talked about the early warning symptoms in a prior Good Morning America interview.
“I probably had [MS] for six or seven years, I think,” Applegate says. “I noticed, especially the first season [of Dead to Me], we’d be shooting and my leg would buckle. I really just put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather.”
“Then nothing would happen for months, and I didn’t pay attention. But when it hit this hard, I had to pay attention.”
When the actress disclosed that she needed a wheelchair to go to set toward the end of the season’s filming, she broke down in tears.
“My symptoms had started in the early part of 2021, and it was, like, literally just tingling on my toes,” Applegate told Robin Roberts.
“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 added, referring to her hit Netflix show Dead To Me.
She also mentioned that despite experiencing “excruciating pain,” she has become accustomed to it.
In an interview with the New York Times, Applegate first discussed her MS diagnosis.
Although it was very challenging to finish the production once she began her treatment, she was continuing to record the third and final season of Dead to Me at the time.
“There was the sense of, ‘Well, let’s get her some medicine so she can get better,’” she said. “And there is no better. But it was good for me. I needed to process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me. So I needed that time.”
She did, however, also stress that she had a “duty” to her job.
Even though the show’s executives reportedly wanted to stop filming when she began undergoing treatment, she stated, “I had an obligation to Liz and to Linda, to our story.”
“If people hate it, if people love it, if all they can concentrate on is, ‘Ooh, look at the cripple,’ that’s not up to me,” she said. “But hopefully people can get past it and just enjoy the ride and say goodbye to these two girls.”
She also admitted to singer-turned-talk-show presenter Kelly Clarkson back in 2022 that she frequently uses her career as an actress as a diversion from her personal issues.
“I’ve probably been going through grief and trauma my whole life, and acting was the place that I got to go to not feel it, you know?” she said at the time, noting that she used acting to avoid dealing with past breakups, trauma, deaths, and breast cancer.
She continued, “The beauty of Dead to Me is that it gave me almost this weird platform of dealing with it, where I didn’t have to be on all the time and I didn’t have to make all the jokes and I could fall apart in a scene.”
“And it was, like, me. It was my soul actually falling apart, unfortunately, in front of the world, but it was cathartic in a beautiful way,” she concluded.
Christina Applegate is an inspiration to all of us because of her perseverance and fortitude!