Selma Blair’s MS Went Undiagnosed for Over 40 Years—She Stopped the Same From Happening to Christina Applegate

glamour.com:

at 10:30 p.m. on August 16, 2018, but, as she reveals in a new interview with , her condition was misdiagnosed or ignored for more than 40 years since her first health struggles as a child. “If you’re a boy with those symptoms, you get an MRI,” said of being a 7-year-old who had lost use of her right eye and left leg, as well as bladder control.

She’d wake up in the middle of the night laughing uncontrollably. It was undiagnosed juvenile MS, she now knows, but doctors and family wrote her off as an attention-seeker after ruling out conditions like cancer. “If you’re a girl, you’re called ‘crazy.” When Blair in an Instagram post in October 2018, she wrote that “I have probably had this incurable disease for 15 years at least.” Now the 50-year-old knows that it’s been much, much longer than that.

Those childhood fits of laughter were due to the disease ravaging her brain’s frontal lobe, and as an adult the episodes shifted into uncontrollable weeping. “I just thought I was a hugely emotional person,” she said.

She lived in “terror” and confusion for years, afraid of being “found out” and having no explanation of why her body was doing what it was doing. “The vomiting or body issues were terrifying, [and the] baldness or rashes,” she said. “I remember being very, very poorly on Hellboy and was diagnosed with cat scratch fever and possible leukemia in Prague.