Christina Applegate Reveals the Everyday Activity MS Makes 'Frightening'

Christina Applegate is known for being candid about living with Multiple Sclerosis, and now she's opening up even more about the day-to-day toll it takes on her life.

In excerpts from a new interview with Vanity Fair, the Dead to Me actress talked about how, thanks to MS, she never really has what she'd call a good day. "You just have little s--tty days," she explained.

People, assumedly good-heartedly, try to offer her solutions, like taking an extra shower, but she says showering is "frightening" with MS. "You can fall, you can slip, your legs can buckle," she elaborated. "Especially because I have a glass shower. It’s frightening to me to get in there."

Beyond the fear of getting hurt while bathing, Applegate further addressed "certain things that people take for granted in their lives that [she] took for granted." For example, she said, "Going down the stairs, carrying things—you can’t do that anymore. It f-----g sucks."

For now, she can still drive her car, but only for short distances. She can also still bring food up to her 12-year-old daughter, Sadie, but she's unable to bring anything back down the stairs at this point.

"We have this little thing at the top of the stairs that we call 'purgatory,'" she said. "So if anyone’s done with anything upstairs, we put it in purgatory so one of my able friends can bring it downstairs." And the "friend" refers to one who lives with her during the week to help her out or her weekend caretaker.

Because Applegate is immunocompromised, she tries to avoid too many other people coming into the house. "I also don’t want a lot of stimulation of the nervous system because it can be a little bit too much for me," she explained. "I like to keep it as quiet and as mellow as possible."

She added, "Imagine just being in a crowd of people and how loud that is. It’s like 5,000 times louder for anyone who has lesions on their brains."

Next: Christina Applegate Fiercely Defends SKIMS Campaign Featuring a Disabled Model Following Criticism