Christina Applegate is candidly revealing the horrific reality of living with the multiple sclerosis (MS) in her new memoir.
The Emmy Award-winning actress was diagnosed with the chronic autoimmune disease in June 2021 at the age of 49 and shared the life-altering news with fans two months later.
“I wish I could say that I am a miracle,” Applegate, now 54, writes in her new memoir, “You with the Sad Eyes,” out today. “Though most days it’s very hard to believe, and in any case, I don’t want to minimize what this disease does to a human body and soul.”
Multiple sclerosis attacks myelin — the protective sheath around nerve fibers — triggering inflammation and scrambling signals between the brain and body.
Nearly 1 million Americans are believed to be living with the disease, which can morph over time, unleashing a wide range of symptoms that flare, retreat and shift in unpredictable ways. While people with MS have a mostly normal life expectancy, the disease gets progressively worse over time.
“The pain I felt initially was not like it is these days,” Applegate writes. “Back then, it was more of an I‐have‐no‐strength kind of pain, rather than the often excruciating agony I’m in now.”
The chronic illness has stripped away even the smallest acts of daily life she once took for granted.
“When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger,” she writes. “My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony.”
And then there’s the exhaustion.
“It feels as though I’ve been on a three-day-long sleepless bender, but no bender for me — that’s how I feel after a good night’s sleep,” Applegate admits. “Hence all the time I spend on and in bed, snuggled up against Jake Ryan, which is what I call my heating pad.”
Early days and diagnosis
Looking back, there were warning signs, like on the day she casually asked her chiropractor why her toes were twitching.
“I’ll never forget the look he gave me,” she recalls. “‘My mom has that,’ he said before quickly changing the subject. ‘Let’s work on some other stuff.’”
When numbness crept into her extremities, she underwent a battery of tests to get to the bottom of her symptoms. The results came on a Monday morning Zoom call that would change everything.
Her doctor showed her an image of her brain, revealing 30 lesions across its surface before breaking the news.
At the time, Applegate was filming the final season of “Dead to Me.” In the beginning, she powered through. But some days, her body refused to cooperate.
“I remember trying to get down the stairs of my house at six o’clock in the morning, and I could make it to only the ninth stair,” she writes. She called out of work that day.
8 on the pain scale — on a good day
Health battles aren’t new territory for Applegate. She famously broke her foot during a pre-Broadway run of “Sweet Charity” in 2005 and underwent a double mastectomy in 2008 after getting an early-stage breast cancer diagnosis.
But MS, she says, is different.
“With my broken metatarsal, well, a broken bone heals. With the cancer, it was taken out of my body, and I was able to move on,” she explains. “But MS is my constant companion. In fact, I will probably go away because of it. It scares me to death.”
Living with the disease, she writes bluntly, “sucks.”
“My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful,” Applegate notes. “When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb.”
Her skin feels as if it’s been scorched, and even on a good day, her pain hovers around an eight out of 10.
Pain… and indignities
MS has also brought indignities she never imagined, including wearing adult diapers.
“Diapers are very MS chic because many of us have incontinence issues. So fun! But at least they make black ones now,” she quips.
“So if you really want to know how I am: I had to pull s—t out of my own a— earlier today because of my disease. Oh, and I fell.”
She even jokes about launching a diaper line with Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who was diagnosed with MS at 20 years old.
“Each one would have a simple message printed on it: F—K THIS,” she writes.
The side effects of treatment
While there is no cure for MS, treatments can slow progression and help with symptoms — but they come with their own drawbacks.
Applegate gets steroid infusions every six months to slow the disease, but the drugs wipe out her B cells, leaving her vulnerable to infection.
They also caused major weight gain — a crushing blow for an actress who has long battled disordered eating, including anorexia during her time on “Married … With Children.”
Even receiving her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was bittersweet.
“Once people stared at my boobs; then they stared at my broken foot,” she said. “But now I knew they were staring not only because I was disabled; they were staring because I was fat, forever an unacceptable fate for women in Hollywood.”
At times, she admits, the weight gain gnawed at her more than the disease itself.
“I didn’t look in the mirror for a year,” Applegate writes.
Doctors eventually placed her on a clear-liquid diet to manage her stomach issues. Over seven months, she dropped more than 50 pounds. Now, she says, her legs are “tinier than they’ve ever been.”
She calls it another cruel twist — making peace with food, only to be alarmed by her frailty.
These days, Applegate has mostly stepped away from on-camera roles but is open to voiceover or producing work. Her focus, she says, is her 15-year-old daughter, Sadie Grace, whom she shares with husband Martyn LeNoble.
But MS is never far from her mind.
“MS is a disease of progression, but it’s also a disease of roller coasters,” she writes. “Some days I can bear to dance, others I fear the wheelchair.”
