NEED TO KNOW
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Christina Applegate is opening up about a candid conversation she had with her teenage daughter Sadie
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The actress says her daughter told her that she misses “who you were before you got sick”
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Applegate shares her daughter with husband Martyn LeNoble
Christina Applegate is opening up about a difficult conversation she had with her daughter.
While appearing on the Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa podcast, the Dead to Me actress, 53, shared that she’d recently had a conversation with her 14-year-old daughter Sadie about her multiple sclerosis, which Applegate was diagnosed with in 2021.
“I don’t get up in the morning with that, I get up because of her,” Applegate says of her daughter Sadie, whom she shares with husband Martyn LeNoble. “She’s the reason I’m still here and trying.”
“But she did say to me, and we got into a big thing the other day, and sorry Sadie, but it has to be said. She said, ‘I missed who you were before you got sick,’ ” the actress recalls. “That is just like a knife to the heart because I miss who I was before I got sick too. Very much.”
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Christina Applegate and Sadie Grace LeNoble at the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards
Over the years, Applegate has been candid about how difficult living with MS has been. Back in May, she made an appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and shared that she rarely leaves home now due to her diagnosis.
“If people saw what my life was like on the daily, they wouldn’t they wouldn’t be able to do it. Because I can sometimes not do it. It’s really, really hard,” she said at the time.
“I don’t really leave the house anymore,” Applegate told O’Brien.
Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021. The progressive disease damages the protective cover around nerves called myelin in your central nervous system, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It can cause muscle weakness, vision changes, numbness and memory issues.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty
Christina Applegate
Last March, Applegate opened up about how MS had affected her parenting, telling PEOPLE that her diagnosis means she can’t always be the mom she wants to be for Sadie.
“She’s had to see the loss of her mom, in the way that I was a mom with her,” Applegate told PEOPLE. “Dancing with her every day. Picking her up from school every day. Working at her school, working in the library. Being present out of the house, out of my bed. She doesn’t see those things anymore. This is a loss for her as well. And we’re both learning as we’re going along.”
The actress went on to say that there are times when her symptoms are so painful that she just isn’t able to be there.
“She’ll come in the room, and if she sees that I’m laying on my side, she knows that she can’t ask me to do anything,” said Applegate, who was diagnosed with MS when she was filming her Netflix series Dead to Me. “And that breaks me, breaks me. Because I love doing stuff for my kid. I love making her food. I love bringing it to her. I love all of it, and I just can’t sometimes. But I try. I try.”
Read the original article on People