Christina Applegate has revealed a tiny symptom that she experienced which signaled that she had multiple sclerosis years before her official diagnosis.
The actress, 52, who is best known for starring as Kelly Bundy in the comedy sitcom Married... with Children between 1987 and 1997, went public with having MS in 2021, having been diagnosed a few months beforehand.
The effects of the condition, a disease of the central nervous system, meant that she struggled while filming the third and final season of Dead To Me.
However, she has since revealed the tiny signs of the disease which she'd ignored up to seven years before she was finally diagnosed.
On Wednesday, during an interview with Good Morning America, the 52-year-old opened up about the signs she noticed early on alongside her long-time friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
"My symptoms had started in the early part of 2021, and it was, like, literally just tingling on my toes," Applegate told Robin Roberts.
"And by the time we started shooting in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair. Like, I couldn’t walk that far," she added, referring to her hit Netflix show Dead To Me.
Watch the interview below:
She then explained how that turned into her legs fully giving way under her, which led her to believe she had the disease years before it was diagnosed by a professional.
"I really just kind of put it off as being tired, or I’m dehydrated, or it’s the weather. And then nothing would happen for, like, months, and I didn’t pay attention," she continued.
She also stated that even though she's in "excruciating pain", she's "used to it now."
"Right now, I’m isolating. That’s kind of how I’m dealing with it, is by, like, not going anywhere, because I don’t want to do it. It’s hard," she added.
Applegate initially opened up about her MS diagnosis during an interview with the New York Times.
At the time, she was still filming the third and final season of Dead To Me, though it was extremely difficult to continue with the project after she started her treatment.
"There was the sense of, 'Well, let’s get her some medicine so she can get better,'" she said. "And there is no better. But it was good for me. I needed to process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me. So I needed that time."
However, she also emphasized that she had a "duty" to her work.
I had an obligation to Liz and to Linda, to our story," she said, despite show bosses apparently wanting to cease filming when she started receiving treatment.
"If people hate it, if people love it, if all they can concentrate on is, 'Ooh, look at the cripple,' that’s not up to me," she added. "But hopefully people can get past it and just enjoy the ride and say goodbye to these two girls."
Back in 2022, she also told singer-turned-talk-show-host Kelly Clarkson that she tends to use her job as an actress to distract her from her real-life problems.
"I've probably been going through grief and trauma my whole life, and acting was the place that I got to go to not feel it, you know?", she said at the time, noting that she used acting to avoid dealing with past breakups, trauma, deaths, and breast cancer.
She continued: "The beauty of Dead to Me is that it gave me almost this weird platform of dealing with it, where I didn't have to be on all the time and I didn't have to make all the jokes and I could fall apart in a scene.
"And it was, like, me. It was my soul actually falling apart, unfortunately, in front of the world, but it was cathartic in a beautiful way," she concluded.
Christina Applegate's grit and resilience is truly an inspiration to us all!
