Friends look out for each other — and that’s exactly what Selma Blair did when Christina Applegate began experiencing symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
In a recent interview with British Vogue, the actress and disability justice advocate said she encouraged Applegate, her longtime friend and colleague, to get tested for MS when she began experiencing a strange “tingling” sensation in her feet.
It took Blair, 50, nearly 40 years to get diagnosed with the potentially disabling neurological condition. She didn’t want Applegate — whom she met more than 20 years ago on the set of The Sweetest Thing — to suffer needlessly.
“I was sitting in Selma’s living room, our children playing, and I told Selma I’d been having this weird tingling in my feet. She said, ‘You must get tested for MS.’ [Even my doctor doubted it] but there it was,” Applegate, 51, who received her MS diagnosis in 2021, told the magazine. “In essence, because of her, I’m going to have a better quality of life.”
Blair also opened up about how her MS symptoms were routinely dismissed by doctors when she was younger (thanks, medical misogyny!). By age 7, she was unable to her left eye, her right leg, or control her bladder.
“If you’re a boy with those symptoms, you get an MRI,” she said. “If you’re a girl, you’re called ‘crazy.’“