Christina Applegate Reveals Daily Struggles With Multiple Sclerosis

Christina Applegate shared her experience living with multiple sclerosis, saying that she has found herself “screaming” in pain.
“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.”
Symptoms often include “numbness, weakness, trouble walking, [and] vision changes.” Currently, there is no cure.
“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.”
“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.”
“You’re really eavesdropping on an intimate conversation,” Sigler said regarding the project.