Selma Blair recalled helping Christina Applegate find out she had multiple sclerosis before the Dead to Me actress revealed she was misdiagnosed.
“Christina was over [at my house], and she was sitting outside, and she was just in so much discomfort, and her feet had so much neuropathy. She was saying it was diverticulitis or something I also was diagnosed with younger as just an attempt to figure out what all these weird things were,” Blair, 54, recalled on the Tuesday, October 20, episode of “The Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg Show,” which was recorded before the Cruel Intentions star’s recent legal troubles.
Blair, who has MS, offered Applegate, 54, some medical advice at the time.
“I said, ‘I don’t mean to put my stuff on you, but you should get an MRI. This sounds neurological. You could have MS,’” Blair told Applegate. “She said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have this stuff.’ I was like, ‘Just get an MRI.’ And she did, and that was the beginning of her journey.”
Christina Applegatewas candid about how multiple sclerosis diagnosis affected her life before her health battle took an unexpected turn. “It’s been a strange journey,” she wrote via X at the time. “But I have been so supported by people that I know who also have this condition. It’s been a tough road. But as we […]
She continued: “I think more damage occurs [when you don’t say something], and I’m glad that she had an opportunity to at least figure out what she can with her doctor and how she’s dealing with it.”
Blair pointed out that “everyone is so different” with their MS journey, adding, “No two MS [cases] look the same. There’s usually some unifying thing like it starts on one side first or you have the weaker side or a drop foot is very common or fatigue can be very common. … But it depends on what’s attacking your system.”
Blair publicly shared her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis in 2018. Three years later, Applegate opened up about her own struggles with the autoimmune disease. After Blair recorded her conversation with Jenny McCarthy, Applegate released an episode of her “MeSsY” podcast in which she shared that she was told she had been misdiagnosed.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she explained in the episode, which was also released on Tuesday. “I’ve gotten worse. So I’m back at square one where I don’t know what’s going on with me. And that’s going to be an online investigation that my doctors are going to be getting into just to find out what has been going on since 2021, why did this happen?”
Selma Blair and Christina Applegate’s connection remains strong even 25 years after The Sweetest Thing. Blair, 53, exclusively told Us the two have also bonded over their respective multiple sclerosis diagnoses over the last few years. “Right when she finished [Dead to Me], she was actually at my house, the kids were playing, and she […]
Months after being released from the hospital for undisclosed reasons, Applegate recalled struggling with the information about her health.
“[My doctor] came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS.’ I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy,’” she recalled. “I lost everything. I lost my job. I lost — I’m sorry. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years — God, I’m so sorry — because it stopped my life.”
Applegate continued: “I still have to use wheelchairs when I go to the doctor’s office. I can’t walk from the car to the room. I’m still in this. Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’ Nothing magical happened.”