‘Married...With Children’ Star Reveals Red-Flag Symptom From Years Before Her Diagnosis

Before Emmy-winning actress Christina Applegate, 54, received her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis in June 2021, there were subtle warning signs that something was amiss.

The beloved Married...With Children star detailed her journey with the autoimmune disease in her newly released memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.

Applegate wrote that there were early warning signs of the condition years before she received the diagnosis, including a particularly odd one: her toes kept twitching.

The symptom initially appeared innocuous but, upon reflection, suggested a potential neurological problem.

MS is a chronic neurological and autoimmune condition that can drastically worsen over time. There are multiple forms, but the symptoms generally include (but are not limited to) mobility issues, numbness or tingling, weakness throughout the body, debilitating fatigue, and vision issues.

Many patients, including Applegate and fellow actress Selma Blair, report experiencing difficulty when walking and often rely on a cane.

She recalled a moment when she asked her chiropractor about it. “I’ll never forget the look he gave me. ‘My mom has that,’ he said before quickly changing the subject. ‘Let’s work on some other stuff,’” she wrote.

She co-hosts MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie Lynn Sigler, a podcast with Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS, where the pair share their experiences with the chronic illness.

On a 2024 episode of the podcast, Applegate said the first signs appeared during the filming of the pilot episode for her comedy series Dead to Me in 2019.

“I remember falling that day,” she said, and Liz Feldman, the creator of the show and a guest on the episode, added that she remembered Applegate losing her balance “a couple of times.”

As Applegate’s symptoms progressed, including numbness spreading to her extremities, the award-winning actress began seeking answers by undergoing medical tests.

One Monday morning, while Applegate was filming the third and final season of Dead to Me in 2021, a doctor called her on Zoom and showed her a scan of her brain with 30 lesions.

Applegate kept pushing through the shoots, though she recalled one occasion when she had to miss a day.

“I remember trying to get down the stairs of my house at six o’clock in the morning, and I could make it to only the ninth stair,” Applegate writes in You With the Sad Eyes, as reported by the New York Post. After the diagnosis, her symptoms worsened: “The pain I felt initially was not like it is these days.”

“Back then, it was more of an I‐have‐no‐strength kind of pain, rather than the often excruciating agony I’m in now. When I wake up, I often can’t get my arm to move far enough to grab the cup of water by my bed or my phone from its charger. My stomach frequently slows to a halt, leaving me to regularly rush to the emergency room in agony,” Applegate says in her memoir.

She continues, “My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful. When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb.”

She compares the condition to earlier health issues: breaking her foot in 2005 and undergoing a double mastectomy after receiving a diagnosis for early-stage breast cancer in 2008.

“With my broken metatarsal, well, a broken bone heals. With the cancer, it was taken out of my body, and I was able to move on. But MS is my constant companion. In fact, I will probably go away because of it. It scares me to death,” she writes in the book.

The comedy star still finds opportunities for humor, even in her darkest moments, writing, “Diapers are very MS chic because many of us have incontinence issues. So fun! But at least they make black ones now. So if you really want to know how I am: I had to pull s--t out of my own a-- earlier today because of my disease. Oh, and I fell.”

During an interview with Good Morning America on Tuesday, the actress said that her diagnosis “still sucks.”

“Anyone who tells you different, they’re not telling you the truth,” Applegate told host Robin Roberts, adding that there are no “great days” with the condition.

“Where am I with acceptance?” she said. “Not at all. I hate it.”

Her memoir also contains revelations unrelated to her health, including that she once ditched Hollywood’s number-one heartthrob at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards.

After inviting a baby-faced Brad Pitt to the VMAs, Applegate was pleased to find that the actor, now 62, acted like a perfect gentleman. However, thanks to a confidence-boosting gown and a moment of youthful brazenness, she ultimately chose to leave with the frontman of metal band Skid Row.

“I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt,” she wrote. “I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row. I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams.”