In a shocking turn of events, Christina Applegate has revealed that she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).
The 54-year-old American actress was diagnosed with the chronic, autoimmune condition that affects the brain and spinal cord in early 2021.
Since then, she’s been vocal about her symptoms and keen to raise awareness of the disease using her public platform.
However, during the new episode of her MeSsy podcast on Tuesday (20 October), she told her co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler that she’s now found out she’s been misdiagnosed.
Through tears, she said: “She 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 emotionally spoke of how she’s now ‘back at square one’ after discovering that she doesn’t have the illness, but is still suffering from debilitating symptoms.
Applegate added: “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better. I haven’t gotten better, Jamie! If anything, 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?”
She described how she’s been going through a ‘great depression because of it’ and ‘lost everything’.
The Hollywood star emotionally continued: “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. 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.”
The actress heartbreakingly said she’s struggling with her place in the MS community following the misdiagnosis news.
She shared: “It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down. It’s this weird feeling because I became this – you and I, the poster children for MS. And everything I was doing. I had a reason. 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.”
Doctor Marwa Kaisey, an associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, joined the duo on the podcast, where she explained that MS misdiagnoses are ‘fairly common’ because we ‘don’t have one single test for MS’.
She outlined: “It’s not like we have something like a pregnancy test that says, ‘Yes. You have it.’ ‘No. You don’t.’ It’s a list of criteria.'”
The doctor added that, alarmingly, nearly 20 percent of those diagnosed with MS turn out not to have the illness.
Kaisey said: “Almost one in five of these people who’d been told they had MS, some for decades, didn’t actually have it. And a majority of them were on medication to treat their MS.”
Applegate said she is still in a ‘state of shock’ but has taken some time off to ‘process’ the news, now calling her health problems ‘the same game with a different name’.