Christina Applegate Says Her MS Battle Has ‘Broken’ Her 14-Year-Old Daughter Sadie

Christina Applegate is always candid with fans when it comes to her battle with multiple sclerosis and has recently spoken about how her condition has impacted her 14-year-old daughter, Sadie.

Speaking on the most recent episode of her MesSy podcast, which she co-hosts with Sopranos alum Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also has MS, Applegate opened up about how her battle with MS has “broken” her daughter.

“I see her look at me when I’m in bed and can’t quite move, or I wanna go say goodnight to her in her room, but I can’t quite get down the hallway for whatever reason that my legs aren’t working that day,” she said, per Us Weekly. “Right now, I can barely get to the bathroom; it’s just the worst, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s broken her.”

She added, “[Sadie] didn’t know this. It was like losing the mom she had to this f****** thing. And the more she’s gotten older now, I think the more it’s hurting her.”

Applegate shares Sadie with her husband, Dutch musician Martyn LeNoble, whom she married on February 23, 2013. The couple welcomed Sadie in January 2011.

Christina Applegate and Sadie Grace LeNoble attend the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards; Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Before announcing her MS diagnosis in 2021, the Dead to Me star said Sadie only knew her as “healthy and a runner and a Pelotoner and a dancer.” After she revealed her condition, Applegate said her daughter was “stoic” about it.

“We had just gone through COVID and no school and all this stuff, and now mommy can’t do all the things that she used to be able to do, and I see it in her eyes. I see it,” she continued. “But you know what’s really beautiful? When we’re out, she knows I’m having such a hard time because I have such anxiety about being out, and she’s always got my arm.”

The Emmy-winning actress said Sadie is “always trying to help” her, “help me with my cane and all this stuff.”

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She added, “At home, she’s like, ‘Can you please go down and make my food ‘cause you’re the only one who can make it?’ She’s like, ‘You’re going down all the steps.’ I’m like, ‘Sadie, I can’t make it down the f****** steps.’ But I do it. I do it because I know that she’s checking in to make sure, can she still take care of me?”

Applegate previously told SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa podcast that despite her pain, she “gets up” in the morning “because of [Sadie].”

“She’s the reason I’m still here and trying,” she stated. “But she did say to me and we got into a big thing the other day — and sorry, Sadie, but it has to be said — she said, ‘I missed who you were before you got sick.’”

Applegate described Sadie’s words as a “knife to [the] heart,” explaining, “Every day of my life is such a loss. See, now I’m gonna cry. See, this is my problem. I’m either, like, extremely traumatic and crying, or I’m cracking myself up. So I’m never in between.”