Emmy Winner Reveals Shocking Error in 5-Year Health Battle
The actress admits she is “not happy at all” about the news.
Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images
Christina Applegate has revealed a shocking error in her lengthy medical battle with multiple sclerosis.
On Tuesday, the 54-year-old Emmy winner revealed that she was misdiagnosed with the debilitating illness in a two-part episode of her MeSsy podcast. The shocking news comes five years after the Married...With Children star first went public with her diagnosis in 2021.
“[My doctor] came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” Applegate said amid tears.
Adding, “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
“Married... With Children” actors Christina Applegate, David Faustino, Ed O’Neill, and Katy Sagal in Los Angeles, California, in 1988.
Aaron Rapoport/Getty Images
Applegate called the news a “mindf---.”
“To me, it comes as I’m back at square one,” she said. “I had a f---ing reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason, and it’s very unnerving, and it’s very confusing for me.”
Christina Applegate delighted fans when she returned to Instagram in September after a long break by posting a video of herself posing for the camera. In the caption, she wrote, “Fresh hair color, new weird spot on my cheek haha.”
Instagram/Christina Applegate
Applegate, who was reportedly hospitalized from March until September, explained that her symptoms had not gotten better.
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“If anything,” she said, “I’ve gotten worse in some ways”
“I’m sitting here having slept all day yesterday feeling like absolute c--p because of the heat,” she said. “My legs aren’t working.”
Christina Applegate said walking was still difficult for her. Here onstage during the 75th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in 2024.
Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images
“Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS,” the Married… with Children star said. “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’ve gone through a great depression because of it,” she said of her initial diagnosis. “I lost everything. I lost my job. What do you say to someone who’s been living with this for six years?”
In tears, she added, “God, I’m so sorry. I get really emotional because it stopped my life.”
Christina Applegate said her symptoms made her lose her career. Pictured here with Chris Hemsworth at the premiere of their film “Vacation” in Los Angeles, California, in 2015.
Kevork Djansezian/Reuters
Applegate, who said she was “still in shock” over the news, detailed how the health professionals discovered her misdiagnosis.
“In January of 2021, I had numbness in my toes and that numbness grew to all of my legs and then the pain started,” she recalled. After, she was tested “for everything under the sun.”
Applegate recalled a doctor showing her “almost 40″ lesions, areas of abnormal tissue, in her brain.
“And that was it, right?” she said. “That was my answer to everything that was going on.”
Christina Applegate with her Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Amy in “Friends” during the 2003 Emmy Creative Arts Awards in Los Angeles.
John Hayes/Reuters
But a few years ago, her doctor wanted to start using new technology to run more tests. And, “just recently,” Applegate heard the shocking news of her misdiagnosis.
“I don’t know what’s going on with me,” Applegate said.“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?”
Jamie-Lynn Sigler was diagnosed with MS in 2002, while filming the third season of "The Sopranos." Pictured here in Los Angeles in 2005.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
In the second part of the episode, Applegate and her co-host, The Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, interviewed Dr. Marwa Kaisey. Sigler was diagnosed with MS in 2002, while filming the iconic mafia drama.
Dr. Kaisey, the director of the Multiple Sclerosis and Neuroimmunology Fellowship Program at Cedars-Sinai, said MS misdiagnoses are “fairly common.”
This is because doctors diagnose the chronic neurological disease using a list of criteria rather than a single test.
“Almost one in five of these people who’d been told they had MS, some for decades, didn’t actually have it,” Dr. Kaisey said. “And a majority of them were on medication to treat their MS.”
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