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Christina Applegate’s Brave Fight With MS: She Reveals How Her Life Has Changed With the Disease
When Christina Applegate walked onstage at the 75th Emmys in January with the assistance of a cane, the audience greeted her with a standing ovation. Ever the comedienne, the Emmy-winning actress couldn’t resist making a few self-deprecating jokes before carrying on with her duties as a presenter.
“Oh, my God, you’re totally shaming me with disability by standing up,” she quipped, drawing laughs as she added, “It’s fine … Body not by Ozempic.”
A lot has changed for the former child star. Though Christina, 52, recently admitted that in that moment she “felt really beloved, and it was a beautiful thing,” she’s also keeping it real. Nearly three years after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — a disease marked by progressive physical and cognitive decline — “I live kind of in hell,” she admitted in a candid March interview with Good Morning America.
Christina, who previously revealed she’d gained 40 pounds because of inactivity and side effects from her MS medications, further confessed, “Right now, I’m isolating, and that’s kind of how I’m dealing with it … by not going anywhere, because I don’t want to do it — it’s hard.”
A New Life
The Married…With Children and Dead to Me star had already faced one enormous health crisis by the time she found out she had MS. In 2008, she underwent a double mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis. In 2017, she had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to reduce further cancer risks. Then a few years later, she started experiencing leg pain and tremors.
After tingling and numbness in her extremities grew worse, doctors in 2021 discovered it was MS. Since then, Christina has had to “process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me,” she says, confessing that she’s “never going to accept” her diagnosis.
Last year, Christina opened up about the challenges. “This is a progressive disease. I don’t know if I’m going to get worse. It’s never a good day. You just have little sh–ty days,” she explained. “There are just certain things that people take for granted in their lives that I took for granted. Going down the stairs, carrying things — you can’t do that anymore. It f–king sucks.”
While she’s still able to drive a car short distances, she still sometimes needs help caring for Sadie, 13, her daughter with musician husband Martyn LeNoble, 54.
Switching Gears
The TV star has been mulling how to move forward in her career. “I’m probably not going to work oncamera again,” she said last year. “I couldn’t imagine getting up at 5 a.m. and spending 12 to 14 hours on a set; I don’t have that in me at this moment.”
Instead, she’s podcasting — her new show, “MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler,” launched on March 19 — and she hopes she can do “a s–t-ton of voiceovers to make some cash to make sure that my daughter is fed and we’re homed.”
Christina doesn’t want to sugarcoat her experience as she ages with MS. “I’m never gonna wake up and go, ‘This is awesome,’ ” she says. “It’s just not gonna happen. I wake up and I’m reminded of [my diagnosis] every day. But I might get to a place where I will function a little bit better.”
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