Christina Applegate Reveals She Was Misdiagnosed With Multiple Sclerosis

On October 20, Christina Applegate returned to MeSsy, the podcast she hosts with actress Jamie Lynn Sigler, for the first time since March. What ought to have been a celebrated homecoming, as Applegate has been recovering from half a year of health-related challenges including a mid-April hospitalization, was bittersweet. Though MeSsy has long been dedicated to Sigler’s and Applegate’s stories about living with MS, or multiple sclerosis, one of the things Applegate learned during her year of health-related struggles was that she does not, in fact, have MS after all, despite having been diagnosed with the illness in 2021. “She came into my room and said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS. Congratulations,’” Applegate said through tears on the show. “I was not happy at all, because you don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better. If anything, I’ve gotten worse.”

Over the course of the two-part episode, Applegate and Sigler process what this news means for the former, who is still adjusting to her new reality — which is very much the same as her old reality, only with less certainty than before. “I had a fucking 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 said. In conversation with Dr. Marwa Kaisey in the back half of the two-part episode, Applegate and Sigler learn that MS misdiagnoses, while unfortunate, are not all that uncommon: Around one in five patients who are treated for the illness do not have MS at all. Applegate told listeners she’s still going to keep working with her team to get better. “Now we have new material to talk about,” she joked, her dark sense of humor still intact. Sigler agreed, adding, “Good thing you didn’t get ‘MS’ tattooed on your body.”