Christina Applegate's daughter, Sadie, says her own medical issues helped her understand mom's MS
On the June 25, 2024 episode of her podcast, MeSsy, Christina Applegate introduced her “favorite guest that we could possibly ever have,” her daughter, Sadie Grace Applegate Le Noble.
While Sadie said she presented the idea of being a guest as a joke, her mom and podcast co-host, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, made it a reality so the 13-year-old could speak about what it’s like to have a parent with multiple sclerosis (MS) and discuss her own health struggles.
“It’s been really hard watching my mom going from this person who could get up and dance,” Sadie said. “Every night, I remember when I was a kid, we would dance and everything in her room for, like, hours at a time when I was, like, I don’t know, seven.”
Sadie explained that it’s been difficult to see Applegate “lose a lot of the abilities she used to have” since her 2021 diagnosis. But seeing her mom live with the disease has made Sadie eager to help Applegate when she needs it, including pushing her in a wheelchair.
Laughing, Applegate admitted she doesn’t love having Sadie push her wheelchair since Sadie tends to run her into walls and people from time to time.
Applegate also got candid about the guilt she carries when she has a bad day with MS. “I don’t ever want you to feel that I’m not capable to be your protector, your mother,” Applegate said to Sadie. “I love you; I want to make you food, I want to bring it to you, I want to do all the things. And I do when I can, and I feel incredibly guilty when I can’t, but you’re always pretty darn cool about it, kid.”
It also helps that Sadie has been able to relate to her mom to a certain degree. Sadie was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), an incurable condition that brings about a number of symptoms including dizziness, fatigue, tremors and a rapid heart rate, according to the Cleveland Clinic. “I’ve had to live with it for a long time,” Sadie explained. “Last year, in sixth grade, I would go to the nurse multiple times for it because I always felt like I was going to pass out.”
Christina Applegate and Sadie Grace LeNoble (John Salangsang / AP)
The nurse, she said, didn’t take her seriously and blamed her symptoms on anxiety. “Them not doing anything about it definitely hurt me physically and emotionally because I was just like, ‘This is rude.’ I feel sick and you are telling me to go to P.E. and run laps around the football field.”
Applegate reveals she didn’t fully understand what was happening with her daughter at first either. “I felt so horrible that we didn’t pay attention to it,” she said. “I didn’t know that there could be this thing until her best friend got diagnosed with POTS, so that kind of brought it to us.”
At home, Applegate said, Sadie had few symptoms. But, as happens with her own MS, Sadie gets out into the world and the “stresses and the anxieties of the world bring upon our symptoms much worse than they would be if we were in the safety and coolness of our own homes.”
Sadie added, “I feel like if I didn’t have this thing it would be a lot harder to understand what my mom’s going through."
This article was originally published on TODAY.com