Chapter 18 The Lady in the Bathtub from The Shining #2
The upside is, I think you become a fully human being when people realize you’re going through something. I never leave home without my cane. I use it both as a way of not falling and as a barrier. When I carry it, I’m saying, “Nope, don’t fuck with me. Don’t knock me over. Step back.”
Sometimes when a person is in agony it’s best to leave them be. My best girlfriend recently went through a horrible tragedy in her life, and at a fundraising party, she turned to me and said, “If one more person looks at me and asks, ‘How are you?’—ugh!”
I knew how she felt. On Dead to Me, we kept the diagnosis to a small group at first, but eventually everyone knew something was wrong because I was showing up to set in a wheelchair. Finally, I brought the crew together.
“I need you guys to understand that what you’ve been seeing is actually multiple sclerosis,” I said.
“And I need you to do me a favor. Please don’t ask me how I am in the morning.
You can say, ‘Hey, bitch!’” A few chuckles rang through the crowd, and I flipped them off as a thank-you.
“Anything but ‘How are you?’ Don’t ask me.
Because the answer’s going to be the same every day: not good. That’s how I am.”
Across the months, I’ve become much better at answering the “How are you?” question. It’s much easier to answer when you don’t worry about what the other person wants to hear.
The true answer is, I’m pissed off. Everything is an effort.
Humor disarms the look of concern and pain my friends can’t hide when they see me.
I don’t mind the jokes. Comedy has always been my armor; how else am I going to stop the tears?
I don’t want to sit here and cry all the time.
I have too much to do with what I have left. I am a mother, after all.
Oh, did I mention I wear a diaper? Diapers are very MS chic because many of us have incontinence issues. So fun! But at least they make black ones now. Jamie and I want to start our own diaper line. Each one would have a simple message printed on it:
FUCK THIS
So if you really want to know how I am: I had to pull shit out of my own ass earlier today because of my disease. Oh, and I fell.
But thank you for asking.
Years ago, I was trying on some pants at Fred Segal, and they were size 2, which is very small. I remember this because usually I was a size 0, and the costume people on Married… with Children would often have to take my clothes in. I was bone, bone, bone.
When I looked in a mirror, I saw something no one else saw, but I always did. I worked so hard on my body, but I was never satisfied.
Then I shot Just Visiting, the movie where someone on the set had been so cruel to me, in London in 2000.
When we finally wrapped and I’d made it to the airport to go home, I felt like a kidnap victim who had finally been released and was now running toward their family members.
I heard later that my friend Jean Reno, who was also in the movie, went into the office of my aggressor and flipped a table on him.
In his beautiful French accent, Jean reportedly said, “If I ever zee you treat zomeone like zat again, I’ll ferking kill you. ”
When I got back from London, I got a lot of help for my dysmorphia, even though it would linger.
One night, my friends were at my house, and we ordered from Pace, the famous Italian restaurant in the Canyon.
They serve a delicious salad called the insalata vegetale.
Filled with zucchini, squash, green beans, tomato, garbanzo beans, and olives, it also boasts tons of provolone and fresh mozzarella, as well as being dressed in a red wine vinaigrette.
The cheese and the oils were not going in my body, no way, so I asked for no cheese and no dressing.
One of my friends, overhearing my order, said “No cheese? But that’s the fun part! ”
Something changed that night. I got it with cheese, and since then, I’ve never gotten it without. I eat the whole damn delicious thing.
My relationship with food is so much better than it ever was, but it took a long time to improve. It was helped by doing Sweet Charity, because to do that show I had to be an athlete. I had to be strong and had to keep up my nutrition.
When the MS hit, the stability I’d fought so hard for went haywire. I had to take fifteen hours of steroid infusions, and immediately everything just went like a fucking blob. It’s all documented on the last season of Dead to Me and at my Hollywood star ceremony.
By November 2022, when I was to receive my Hollywood Walk of Fame star, I didn’t even look like “Christina Applegate” anymore. All the medications and ravages of the disease had loaned me entirely the wrong kind of facelift.
The day I got my star was about the first time anyone had seen me since my diagnosis, and I felt humiliated. I thought I’d even have to go off the rack for the ceremony—and no one goes off the rack in this town—until Christian Siriano came to my rescue and made me something beautiful to wear.
That day I went barefoot because it was too uncomfortable to wear shoes. It’s a good job I don’t care about germs, though I was a bit worried about stepping on a used needle or something.
Hollywood has seen better times.
The star they gave me is barely a stone’s throw from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, right outside the Marshalls on Hollywood and North Orange.
That location meant so much to me, to be so central and in the thick of it.
I hated how I looked that day, how much this illness had taken from me, but this was my Oscar, after all. It was time to step out in public.
Then something magical happened: a steady, heady stream of my dearest friends went up to the podium and said incredibly lovely things, and by the end of the ceremony, everyone, including me, was crying—even the guy who has to go to all of them because he’s the CEO of the whole thing.
He said, “I’ve been to a number of these star ceremonies, and as I sit here and listen to all these tributes, you are by far one of the most beloved recipients of a star that I’ve ever witnessed. ”
Damn.
Wouldn’t you know it: I’m a survivor yet again.
There’s a video of me when they revealed the actual star that day—they had brought me a chair to sit in because… MS—and you can see my feet swinging back and forth like some excited five-and-a-half-year-old in line to see Star Wars. This is magic, this is magic, this is magic…
Since then, I’ve sometimes gone down to visit my star in front of Marshalls—say if I have friends in town and they want to see it.
I put my mask on and wear the clothes I probably slept in, and we all hang out by the star, just for fun.
One time I was sitting by my star, and to make my friends laugh, when tourists would come by and read my name, from behind my mask I’d say, “Oh, it’s really sad… she died.”
For a year or more, people saw only this weird version of me created by those steroid infusions.
For all the joy of finally getting my star, it was still humiliating and horrible and devastating to be seen this way.
Not just because I was bigger—that was one thing—but because the girl who had control all her life no longer had that control.
I want to throw up when I think of the pictures that are out there of me.
I look sad and embarrassed. Because all I can think is, Everyone is staring.
Once people stared at my boobs; then they stared at my broken foot.
But now I knew they were staring not only because I was disabled; they were staring because I was fat, forever an unacceptable fate for women in Hollywood.
“Oh wow,” I could imagine everyone saying.
“Christina Applegate, of all people, is fat. Not to mention she’s got a cane.
Not to mention she’s got a disease.” When I walked out onstage to do Jimmy Kimmel’s show three years after my diagnosis, I was touched when Jimmy said, “For people, it’s a little bit shocking.
You come out with a cane and people love you and are concerned about you.
” As I told him, this was my now, my normal.
If anyone asks me how I am these days, my answer is always the same: “I’m living the dream, just living all the dreams.” I use that line because I’ve found that it curtails people’s probing questions.
There was none of me left in that body. The person I’d always been went away and I had to discover who that new person was overnight.
Sometimes the weight bothered me more than the disease. I promised you full honesty, didn’t I? I suppose that’s the curse of being a woman. Refer back to “mind sticker”; not much has changed.
I didn’t look in the mirror for a year.
Then I was put on a clear-liquid diet because of my stomach issues, and all of a sudden, everything just dropped off of me. Within seven months, all of it was gone, and I was down by fifty pounds or more. These days, my legs are tinier than they’ve ever been.
The illness has given me serious stomach issues.
As I write this, there are tamales downstairs that are the best tamales you could ever have—I want to eat five of them right now, I’m so hungry—but I know if I do, I’ll probably end up in the ER again, as I have so many times recently.
So once again, the good is followed by the bad: I’ve managed to create a much healthier place when it comes to my relationship with food, only to get out of the shower and see legs that are scary-looking.
I have no muscles—just sticks. It’s dangerous to be walking around with zero muscles on my body: it means my bones aren’t protected if I fall, and it scares me.
But there’s still that little voice in my head saying, “You’re really skinny. You have the legs you always wanted. Good for you.” This is the sickness.
But she’s not going to win.
For the longest time, Sadie didn’t want to talk about my illness. Even these days, if it comes up, she says, “It’s fine.”