Christina Applegate Has 30 Lesions on Her Brain Amid MS Battle

Christina Applegate wants to be completely honest about her multiple sclerosis journey. After being diagnosed with MS in 2021, the Dead to Me actress, 52, is determined to be open and real about her health, revealing in a new interview with Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast that the disease is the "worst thing that's happened" to her in her life. 

"I'm not ready for the healing yet. I will get there. When someone says, 'Have you accepted this as your new normal?' No, f-k you, absolutely not,' she told Shepard, revealing that she has 30 lesions on her brain. "My biggest one is behind my right eye, so my right eye hurts a lot," she said, continuing of her symptoms that her "hand starts to go weird" and that she sometimes gets a "seizure-y feeling" in her brain.

Applegate doesn't want to sugarcoat her diagnosis for the public. "It's the worst tattoo. It sucks. I'm not gonna sit here and... some people go, 'Oh my god, cancer's the best thing that happened to me!' And I'm like, 'Uhh, then you had a pretty s-ty life,'" she said. "This is the worst thing that's happened to me in my entire life. I hate it so much. I'm so mad about it."

The Emmy winner explained that her determination to stay honest about her MS battle comes from how she handled her breast cancer diagnosis publicly in 2008. "When I had breast cancer at 36 years old, I went out and I was the good girl talking about, 'Oh, I love my new boobs!' That are all scarred and f-ked up. What was I thinking?" Applegate recalled. "My first interview was with Robin Roberts when I had cancer and I'm sitting there lying my ass off about how I felt."

Applegate was "lying" about how she was feeling during her cancer battle, which hurt her even more. "I fell into the wall and sobbed because it was a lie," she recalled. "Everything I was saying was a freaking lie. It was me trying to convince myself of something, and I think that did no service to anyone."

And while there were positive things that came out of her taking her cancer journey public, Applegate said she still felt like she was hiding something. "Yes, I started a foundation right away. Yes, I did all the things I had to do. And we raised millions of dollars for women to get MRIs who were at risk. Yes, we did a good thing, but at the back of it, I was taking off my bra and crying every night, and I wish that I had said that," she revealed. "I didn't like my boobies. I still don't like my boobies. It's horrible. I don't have nipples. It's weird."