Christina Applegate broke down in tears while revealing she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“[My doctor] came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS,’” Applegate, 54, said during her return to the “MeSsY” podcast on Tuesday, October 20. “I was, like, not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”
Applegate and cohost Jamie Lynn Sigler, who has lived with MS since 2002, were joined by Dr. Marwa Kaisey for a discussion on MS misdiagnoses. Kaisey, an associate professor with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center department of neurology, noted being misdiagnosed is “fairly common” because “we don’t have one single test for MS.”
“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,” she continued. “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, who started crying during the episode, pointed out that she was still struggling with symptoms that are now unexplained.
“You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better,” she explained. “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?”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Applegate reflected on going through a “great depression” after the health revelation.
“But I lost everything. 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,” she 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’m still in this. Nothing magical happened when she said, ‘You don’t have MS.’ Nothing magical happened.”
Applegate is still in a “state of shock” over the “mindf***” misdiagnosis.
“It’s weird because I feel like I let everybody down,” she shared. “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.”
Applegate went public with her MS diagnosis in 2021 and has been candid about her health battle ever since. Earlier this year, Sigler, 45, announced that their podcast would be taking a “short break” while the pair focused on their respective book launches. (Sigler dropped her book, And So It Is: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope, in May, while Applegate’s memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, was published in March.)
News broke in April that Applegate had been hospitalized one month prior and was later discharged.
“I have no comment whether she is in the hospital or what her medical treatments are,” a spokesperson for Applegate told Us at the time. “She’s had a long history of complicated medical conditions that she has been refreshingly open about, as evidenced in her memoir and on her podcast.”
Applegate, for her part, issued a message in April after seeing the outpouring of support from fans.
“Health issues are a constant for me, but I’m a strong chick and I’m getting stronger and better every day,” Applegate wrote via Instagram at the time. “I’m taking a moment to focus on my health, but I’ll be back with more to say soon enough.”
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