Christina Applegate wants to have ‘shots with Cher’ amid MS battle
Actress Christina Applegate has revealed what she would like to do “with the days I have left,” and one of them is to do “shots with Cher.”
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Celebrities like Halle Berry, Timothée Chalamet, Miley Cyrus and Chris Rock attended Sunday’s glamour-defining Vanity Fair Oscars Party. But Selma Blair’s tawny-haired Labrador – her service dog – is the star that shone brightest.
Patricia Clarkson lay on the floor in her gown gleefully cuddling Scout. The “Legally Blonde” actress says she “didn’t get one word” from acquaintance Michael Keaton. “He’s just like, ‘Hey, can I get a picture with Scout?’ The next thing I know, they’re kissing, and Batman’s gone in the night. And all I have is my dog to prove that he kissed Batman.”
Scout, who Blair jokes is “the best boyfriend, strictly platonic,” helps her manage symptoms of her Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a disease in which the immune system attacks the central nervous system. Symptoms can manifest differently in each person, and there are multiple types. Blair has relapsing-remitting, which can result in a flare-up of symptoms for a period of time. Those with relapsing-remitting MS can experience trouble with their vision, extreme fatigue and numbness, according to Johns Hopkins.
Blair, 52, has partnered with pharmaceutical company EMD Serono on Express4MS, an effort from the pharmaceutical company to build a community where those with MS can share their experiences.
Connecting with others who have MS has proved ‘really cathartic’
Scout assists with Blair’s balance and eases her nerves about being in public. “When I have to kneel down to be able to talk more clearly or to just kind of get my circulation on track, it made a lot more sense to have a dog by my side than constantly just dropping and squatting and talking to people,” she says. “He helps me just move forward, past it because once I start getting nervous or self-conscious, it all kind of devolves.”
In the early days of Blair’s diagnosis, she’d research her symptoms online or attempt to connect with others who have the disease to no avail.
“It was actually really cathartic for me to hear other people’s stories and to make sense of my own because I wasn’t even connecting some dots,” she says.
Once when Blair had difficulty swallowing, she panicked. “It started snowballing, like, ‘Oh, God, I’ll never swallow again. It’s just going to get worse,’” she says. Hearing that others experienced the same symptom for a period helped quell her frenzy. “I couldn’t understand why (being in) the sun would take away my speech and give me the dystonia,” Blair says. “And it was through other people that I had found that.”
Moving from ‘a crisis space’ to being ‘relapse-free’: ‘I have really built stamina’
Blair talked to USA TODAY in 2021 for her documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” that chronicled a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation performed in the summer of 2019. By removing and replacing stem cells and providing chemotherapy in between, the process aims to reset one’s immune system.
“Before I had gone in for that aggressive treatment in Chicago, I was really in a crisis space,” Blair says. But “that treatment didn’t work as well as I had hoped. It definitely slowed the progression and allowed me to catch my breath,” but when Blair switched doctors her new physician told her she’d relapsed.
Today she’s “doing really well,” she says, “and I’ve had so much time relapse-free that now I have really built stamina.”
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