Everything Christina Applegate shares about living with multiple sclerosis

Credit: Syed Adityani/Netflix

November 2022

this friends alum tells type her role on netflix dead to me Probably the “last one” she played. “Because of my illness, I didn’t know the extent of my abilities,” she shared.

Applegate said she discovered she had multiple sclerosis at work, and went on to recall the symptoms she experienced before receiving her diagnosis.

“I didn’t know what was happening to me. In January of that year, my toes went numb and I ignored it. The ball of my foot went numb and I ignored it. All of a sudden, it was like I fell,” she explained. “People were like, ‘Oh, it’s just psycho.’ At this point, they had to take me to the set in a wheelchair because I couldn’t walk far away from the set. I was sleeping all the time, gained 40 pounds—a lot was going on.”

Although she doesn’t think she’ll watch the final season dead to me — “It was so hard for me” — the California native shared that finishing the show was her only option.

“I couldn’t have done it without the need to tell our story. They would have pulled the plug, you know? Because it was like torture — they felt like they were torturing me, too. But I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no: We have to finish this story. This is too important to our hearts; too important to our souls,’ she told me. type. “We have to give this gift to ourselves – and to the people who love these characters, we also have to give them an ending. So, if that means I have to take a break in the middle of the day to sleep – or I just leave because I can’t do it anymore – then that’s what we have to do. “