Christina Applegate is sharing heartbreaking details about her battle with multiple sclerosis.
It’s been three years since Applegate openly shared her multiple sclerosis diagnosis with the world in 2021. Since her diagnosis, Applegate has made a handful of public appearances revealing she now uses the aid of a cane to move around.
While a guest on Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, Christina Applegate discussed the pain she’s enduring as she continues to live with MS.
Applegate revealed that she now has 30 lesions on her brain. She explained that the largest of the legions is directly behind her right eye.
Applegate told Shepard that the legion is causing her a devastating amount of pain. It’s “the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life. I hate it so much, and I’m so mad about it,” Applegate revealed.
Applegate said the pain is so great that “you can’t overcome it.” But she does, for her 13-year-old daughter who she calls her reason for getting up in the morning. “She’s my go to sleep with hope that I get up in the morning.”
That’s not all she’s currently dealing with. While she’s thankful the legion hasn’t impacted her eyesight yet, Applegate revealed that her hand also “starts to go weird and then I’ll get a seizure-y feeling sometimes in my brain.”
“This one,” Applegate says of having MS, “This is it. This is life. There is no surgical option. There’s no ringing the bell when you’re done with chemo. You live with this for the rest of your life.”
And while Applegate holds on to hope that there will be a cure in her lifetime, the actress calls MS a “disease of progression and you just progressively get worse.” She calls MS the “worst tattoo.”
And while this battle has been extremely difficult for her, Christina Applegate says she wants to be more open about living with MS. As Applegate told Dax, she regrets battling breast cancer in private back in 2008.
When talking about her journey with MS and her decision to retire from acting, Applegate admits she didn’t want to stop acting. “But in the last year, it has been nice to just sleep. I haven’t slept in 50…whatever years I’ve been doing this. I’ve been in SAG since 1974.”
But if she had a choice in the matter, Applegate says she would trade in MS to continue working. “I don’t like not being able to the choice. The universe hates me.”