Christina Applegate’s Daughter Says Her Own Health Condition Helps Her Understand Mom’s MS

"It’s been really hard watching my mom going from this person who could get up and dance," the teen 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, 7."

She went on to share how difficult it's been to see her mom "lose a lot of the abilities she used to have" since being diagnosed with the health condition in 2021.

However, seeing her mom live with the disease has allowed Sadie to step in and help Christina out, including pushing her in a wheelchair. In response, Christina joked that she doesn’t love it when her daughter pushes her wheelchair since Sadie tends to make her run into walls and other people at times.

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The actress also went on to open up about the guilt that comes with having a bad day with MS. "I don’t ever want you to feel that I’m not capable to be your protector, your mother," she 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."

But to a certain extent, Sadie can understand her mother's health struggles because she deals with her own. She was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is an incurable condition that causes symptoms like dizziness, fatigue, tremors, and a rapid heart rate.

"I’ve had to live with it for a long time," Sadie shared about her POTS. "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." She says the nurse never took her symptoms seriously and chalked it up to being 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 PE and run laps around the football field," Sadie continued. Christina also carried some guilt around not knowing what was going on with her daughter.

"I felt so horrible that we didn’t pay attention to it," she explained. "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, Sadie experienced few symptoms. But, as what tends to happen with her own MS, Christina said, her daughter's symptoms heighten when she goes 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."

Experiencing this helps Sadie better relate to her mom. She noted, "I feel like if I didn’t have this thing it would be a lot harder to understand what my mom’s going through."