Christina Applegate Reveals Daily Struggles With Multiple Sclerosis

Christina Applegate arrives onstage during the 75th Emmy Awards at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 15, 2024. Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

Christina Applegate shared her experience living with multiple sclerosis, saying that she has found herself “screaming” in pain.

During Monday’s episode of her “MesSy” podcast, the 52-year-old actress, who was diagnosed with MS in 2021, revealed that she continues to deal with the physical symptoms daily.

“I lay in bed screaming,” Applegate said alongside her co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who is also battling the disease. “Everybody has different ways of it showing up. I lay in bed screaming. Like the sharp pains, the ache, that squeezing.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the “immune system attacks the protective sheath that covers nerve fibers, known as myelin,” the nerve damage inhibits communication, or electrical impulses, between the brain and the rest of the body.

Symptoms often include “numbness, weakness, trouble walking, [and] vision changes.” Currently, there is no cure.

On the episode, the podcast duo spoke with Rory Kandel, a California bakery owner who discovered she had MS in December of last year. Since learning of her diagnosis, Kandel shared that her symptoms are “manifesting as pain.”

“It feels like I have knives in my stomach, like I can’t move,” she said. “Like, I'll be laying in bed, and I wake up, and I physically can’t turn from side to side,” she told the co-hosts.

When Kandel asked Applegate if she shared the same feeling, the actress said, “Every single day of my life. I can’t even pick up my phone sometimes because now it’s [MS] traveled into my hands. So, I’ll try to go get my phone or get my remote to turn on the TV or whatever [and] sometimes I can’t even hold them. I can’t open bottles now.”

Although they may appear healthy from the outside, the “Married … With Kids” star attributed it to “the beauty of the invisible disease.”

“Jamie knows that I just lay in bed all the time,” Applegate said later in the episode. “I mean, I worked for almost 50 years, so I’m kind of okay with it. But if I put my feet on the ground and they’re hurting like extraordinarily bad to the touch, I was like, ‘Yep. Gonna get back in my bed and pee in my diaper because I don’t feel like walking all the way to the damn bathroom.’”

“I actually don’t lay here and pee in my diaper. That’s just a joke,” she clarified. “But it’s so freaking painful and so hard and so awkward.”

In March, during an appearance on “Good Morning America,” Applegate detailed the agonizing pain that has caused her to “live kind of in hell,” adding that she is “not putting a timestamp” on her grief.

“I’m never gonna wake up and go, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m just gonna tell you that. Like, it’s just not gonna happen,” she shared. “I wake up, and I’m reminded of it every day. But I might get to a place where I will function a little bit better.”

“Right now, I’m isolating,” she continued. “And that’s kinda how I’m dealing with it, is by, like, not going anywhere because I don’t want to do it. It’s hard.”

‘MeSsy’ Podcast

Applegate and Sigler co-host the “MeSsy” podcast, which launched in March of this year. Bonding over their shared journey with multiple sclerosis, the duo speak on their experiences “as they self-reflect, learn, laugh, and grow through their own raw and often-times hilarious conversations with each other, friends, co-stars, and the people that keep them going through the messiness of life,” as stated on the podcast’s website.

“You’re really eavesdropping on an intimate conversation,” Sigler said regarding the project.