Publications
Partners
Selma Blair is winning her battle against multiple sclerosis (MS). Three years after she was first diagnosed with it, she shared she’s in remission.
The incurable auto-immune disease has brought the 49-year-old immense pain and physical disability. Selma has difficulty speaking and has lost the use of her left leg.
Not long after the Cruel Intentions star was diagnosed with the debilitating autoimmune disease in 2018, she underwent chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, and an extended hospital stay – a last-ditch effort following treatment after treatment with no improvement.
Throughout the process, cameras – controlled by director Rachel Fleit, who also has an autoimmune disorder – chronicled her ups and downs for the upcoming documentary, Introducing Selma Blair.
At one especially low point, Selma believed she was dying. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now,” she says into a toy phone in the trailer for the documentary, “We’re shooting the final days of my life.”
“I was told to make plans for dying,” she reveals in the doccie. “Not because I have MS. Because I’m fighting MS.”
Blair admitted that enduring her MS flare up was tough on her as well as her son, Arthur (10).
“It’s not that MS was on a path killing me. I mean it was killing me with this flare lasting so long,” she added.
“I was so burnt out. If there was an option to halt me, to rebalance after being hit so hard with that last flare, it’s absolutely for my son.”
Now, thankfully, she is in remission.
Selma made the announcement earlier this week, during a virtual appearance at the discovery+ Television Critics Association panel to promote the documentary which will premiere in US theatres on 15 October and stream on discovery+ from 21 October.
She still experiences “glitches” from time to time and needs ongoing treatment.
“My prognosis is great. Stem cell put me in remission,” the actress said.
“It took about a year after stem cell for the inflammation and lesions to really go down.”
Stem cell treatment is not a cure for MS but can help to stabilise the disease and improve disability, researchers have said. MS sufferers who undergo treatment will go through periods of relapses and remissions. The remission period can last for weeks, months, or in some cases, years, but it doesn't mean the patient no longer has MS, says Healthline.com.
“I was reluctant to talk about it because I felt this need to be more healed and more fixed,” Selma says.
“I’ve accrued a lifetime of some baggage in the brain that still needs a little sorting out or accepting. That took me a minute to get to that acceptance.”
For years she went from doctor to doctor, desperate for a diagnosis. But each time they brushed her concerns off – some told her she was stressed, others that she was perimenopausal or simply exhausted from being a single mom.
But she knew it was something more than stress or fatigue. She had neck pain, vertigo, trouble walking and loss of feeling in one leg.
In the run-up to her diagnosis, she experienced bouts of extreme fatigue, making stops on the way home from the school run to take a nap. There were days the pain was so bad Selma resorted to alcohol.
“I wasn’t always drinking but there were times when I couldn’t take it and I was really struggling with how I was going to get by in life.”
For months she pleaded with doctors to send her for an MRI scan, which can detect MS, among other disorders, but they wouldn’t budge.
She became so desperate she reached out to fellow actor Michael J Fox (57), who’s been living with Parkinson’s disease since 1991. She sent him a message on social media, hopeful that would be able to offer advice.
“My MS hits in spots that make it very Parkinsonian,” she says.
“I said, ‘I don’t know who to tell but I’m dropping things. I’m doing strange things. I have a tremor. My pinkie won’t stop moving. I can’t feel my leg; it’s bouncing.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry if this is inappropriate. I didn’t know who to turn to.’ And I didn’t know him.
“He got in touch with me and we began a conversation. And I was like, I have Michael J Fox’s email now. I’m pretty cool!”
It was only when she fell in front of her doctor that she was sent for an MRI. She received the diagnosis within an hour. She was relieved: she had MS and at least now she knew what she was dealing with.
“I cried when they told me,” she says.
“They weren’t tears of panic. They were tears of knowing I now had to give in to a body that had lost control. There was some relief in that.”
The condition affects each sufferer differently – and in Selma’s case it’s not only her movements but also her speech that’s affected.
“It’s called a snowflake disease because it’s different for everyone. Not one size fits all.
”She’s grateful for her renewed health. “I never really liked life. I do now,” she says. “I was so scared in life, so to suddenly start to find an identity and a safety in me and figure out boundaries and time management and energy, I’m having the time of my life.”
More than ever, she wants to help those suffering with auto-immune diseases and hopes to create a line of adaptive clothing for people with disabilities.
“There are a lot of times I do wish I could get out of California and just go back home to Michigan and recover more quietly,” she admits.
But at the same time, she is also cognisant of how her fame has helped bring awareness to the disease and it has helped others to find strength in their own illnesses.
“To hear even just me showing up with a cane or sharing something that might be embarrassing, it was a key for a lot of people in finding comfort in themselves and that means everything to me,” the actress says.
“I’m thrilled that I have some platform. In no means am I saying that I’m speaking for all people in this condition or any condition of chronic illness, I’m speaking my story and that helps normalize one thing to open the door for other people to be comfortable in telling their stories.”
Last week actress Christina Applegate also shared that she had been diagnosed with the condition.
SOURCES: VANITYFAIR.COM, DAILYMAIL.CO.UK, INSTAGRAM.COM, NATIONALMSSOCIETY.ORG, PAGESIX.COM, INDEPENDENT.CO.UK, LATIMES.COM
