Christina Applegate shared an unusual look at the physical side of multiple sclerosis, talking about how the disease can often make her “scream” in pain.
“I was lying in bed screaming — like, sharp pains, pain, that squeezing,” Dead to me the actress said, revealing that her symptoms have progressed during the Nov. 5 episode of MeSsy, the podcast she co-hosts with Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS.
In the episode, the two spoke with Rory Kandel, owner of Rory’s Bakehouse, who said her MS also “manifests itself as pain.”
“I feel like I have knives in my stomach,” Kandel said. “For example, I’ll be lying in bed, I wake up and I physically can’t turn from one side to the other.”
Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
John Russo
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“It’s the worst,” said Applegate, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021. The Cleveland Clinic explains that progressive disease “damages the protective covering around nerves called myelin in your central nervous system. It can cause muscle weakness, vision changes, numbness and memory problems.”
“Do you feel that way?” Kandel asked, prompting Applegate to reply, “Every day of my life.”
“Sometimes I can’t even pick up my phone because now it’s traveled into my hands, so I’ll, like, try to get my phone or the remote to turn on the TV or sometimes, I can’t even hold them. I can’t open bottles now.”
“But we look good,” Kandel said.
“Because that’s the beauty of an invisible disease,” Applegate said.
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Rory’s Bakehouse owner Rory Kandel.
Rory’s Bakehouse/Instagram
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The Married…with children alum shared that depending on her pain level, she “just laid in bed the whole time. I mean, I’ve been working for almost 50 years, so it’s kind of fine with me.”
Getting out of bed in the morning can be so painful that Applegate compared it to “the floor is lava.” The floor is lava.”
“It looks like someone put a hot poker in my hole,” Sigler said of those first steps of the day.
“I put my feet on the ground and they hurt, like, extremely bad to the touch,” Applegate said. “I was like, yeah. I’m going to go back to bed and pee in my diaper because I don’t feel like going all the way to the damn bathroom,” she said, quickly adding, “I’m not actually laying here peeing in my diaper. It’s just a joke.”
“But it’s like it’s so fucking painful and so hard and so uncomfortable.”
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Source: HIS Education