Christina Applegate’s doctor walked into the room and said the words every person with a progressive neurological disease is supposed to want to hear: “Congratulations, you don’t have MS.” Everyone else was delighted. She was not. “You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of a sudden I’m better,” she said. “If anything, I’ve gotten worse… I’m back at square one.”
She still needs a wheelchair to cross the parking lot to the doctor’s office. Nothing magical happened when the label was ripped off. She still has every symptom of someone with MS and zero idea what any of it means. The disease didn’t get the memo. It just kept eating her alive.
Then Megyn Kelly, in the full mean-girl mode that has become the style of podcastistan, decided the real problem was that Applegate was crying because she no longer gets to be “the face of this disease.” A wild goose chase, she called it.
She explained that celebrities lean into their health problems and turn them into a brand. The woman who spent five years treating a disease she didn’t have while her body kept collapsing was apparently the villain for not performing the correct emotion about losing the only explanation she had.
In an ecosystem already short on compassion, Kelly managed to treat a misdiagnosis that left someone still disabled as evidence of grift. The standard operating procedure of punch-down content, delivered with the serene certainty of someone who has never had to negotiate with their own legs about whether today is a walking day.
Janice Dean, who has lived with MS for more than 20 yrs, called the comments disgusting and labeled Kelly a mean girl. She noted that Kelly already knew how long it took for doctors to diagnose Dean herself, and she said she was grateful Applegate had been a voice for so many of them. Dean added that she is one of those “loser people” who talk about their diagnosis to help others, and that she has been in and out of the hospital in recent weeks.
I have enormous respect and esteem for Janice. She is a fellow MS warrior and a kind, lovely woman who has spent years doing the unglamorous work of making the disease less invisible without turning her own suffering into a performance of superiority. When someone who actually lives with this disease calls the commentary disgusting, that is not celebrity drama. That is a data point from the people who have to navigate the same broken system and the same bad days.
I got my MS diagnosis 16 years ago after a lifetime of doctors treating my symptoms as a personality defect. Fatigue that made standing up feel like a moral failing was anxiety. Numbness that came and went was stress. Vision that grayed out like a bad signal was drama.
The suggestion, delivered with the calm of people who have never had their nervous system stage a coup, was that it was all in my head—psychosomatic, imaginary, or at least mostly imaginary, and therefore mine to manage with better coping skills and fewer complaints. But it’s hard to ignore a woman whose entire right side curls in on itself while she goes temporarily blind.
Turns out it actually was in my head. And the myelin that was supposed to be insulating both. Just not in the stupid, psychological way they meant. The lesions were real. The inflammation was real. The progressive damage was real. For once, they had accidentally stumbled into a technically accurate statement while missing every relevant detail. It was like diagnosing a house fire as “the problem is heat” and recommending meditation instead of the fire department.
The relief when someone finally said the words was not cinematic. It was the quieter, meaner kind: someone had finally stopped gaslighting the evidence and started looking at the actual MRI. After years of being treated like a difficult patient who had invented an illness for attention or because she was bad at life, having a name for it felt like being allowed to exist. Not cured. Not fixed. Just no longer required to perform wellness for people who found my symptoms inconvenient.
Sixteen years later, my legs still sometimes lose the argument with gravity. The diagnosis didn’t hand me a better body. It just stopped some of the extra punishment for having the body I have, and when the flares become intolerable, home healthcare trots out with a steady drip of IV steroids to suppress the attack, so I don’t go permanently blind.
Applegate spent years as the public face of something she turned out not to have, while living with the real, ongoing consequences of whatever she does have. Now she is back in the diagnostic wilderness with 5 years of MS-specific treatments behind her, a public identity built around a disease that isn’t hers, and commentators who seem personally offended that she isn’t smiling about losing the label.
In podcastistan, the default move is to treat someone else’s medical pain as content and then score points for noticing that the chaos is messy. Compassion is already scarce. Treating a misdiagnosis that leaves someone still disabled as evidence of a cottage industry is nothing short of grotesque.
The people who treated her reaction as a gotcha are the same people who have never had to explain to a neurologist that yes, they really can’t feel their feet today, and no, they didn’t invent the numbness for engagement. There is a particular dark comedy in the fact that a wrong diagnosis can still be more useful than no diagnosis at all.
At least with the wrong name you sometimes get treatments that happen to help, or a community that understands what “I can’t walk from the parking lot” actually means.
Without a name, you get to keep explaining yourself to people who have already decided you are either exaggerating or shopping for a more interesting life. Applegate’s doctor congratulated her. Her body did not receive the memo. Megyn Kelly apparently thinks the real issue is that Applegate no longer gets to monetize the misery. Most of us who have lived through the years of “have you considered that this is psychological?” would trade all of it for a single doctor who just believed us.
Janice Dean has spent more than two decades doing the opposite of what Kelly described. She has talked about her diagnosis because the alternative is silence, and silence does not get you diagnosed faster or treated better or believed sooner. I respect that work. I respect the woman doing it.
The psychosomatic era of my medical life is over, but the memory of it is useful. It taught me that “it’s all in your head” is sometimes accidentally correct and still almost always useless. It also taught me that the people most eager to police how a sick person is supposed to feel about their illness are rarely the ones who have to live inside it. Applegate is still sick. She just lost the name she thought explained why.
The rest of us who have spent years arguing with doctors about whether our nervous systems are real will recognize that particular hell. The congratulations don’t help. The mean-girl lectures don’t help. The lesions, whatever is actually causing them, do not care what anyone on the internet thinks she should be feeling about them.
Christina Applegate is still sick. Still disabled. But now, she no longer knows why, which is its personal hell.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.