Selma Blair, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018, was once told by a doctor that finding a boyfriend could solve her “unbearable” pain and discomfort.
The actress recalled how even as a child she experienced chronic headaches and fevers, but she felt constantly dismissed by medical professionals, many of whom deemed her “dramatic.”
“It sounds like doctors made up all sorts of excuses,” “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker said to the actress during a recent sit-down. “One doctor even told you, ‘Maybe you need a boyfriend.’ What was that like? Was it infuriating?”
“I just cried. I just cried. I had no capability to process. What am I supposed to do with this information?” Blair, 51, replied. “I knew the pain was real. I thought it was. But I did start to convince myself, ‘You’re overly sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with you. Get it together, you lazy, lazy whatever.’”
The “Cruel Intentions” star felt many of her doctors were “just not seeing” her and that there was a “gender bias” at play.
“There would be a boy in my grade that would go in for the exact same chronic headache and fever, and he is in surgery and an MRI within the week,” she said. “I was never given an MRI even though I always had headaches and fever[s] and balance [issues] or my leg didn’t work, but they said, ‘Oh, she’s just dramatic.’”
Asked what she believes causes a gender bias in medicine, the “Legally Blonde” actress responded, “I think primarily, when I was young … they were all older male doctors who really probably did not know the intricacies of a girl and that everything does not need to be blamed on menstruation. Yes, that comes with its own bag of things to know about, but I think there’s just kind of a rift.”
Blair also noted that MS symptoms can look “different for everyone, and they can be disguised as emotional things.”
She explained, “I have prefrontal damage that would cause hysterical crying and laughing, and I just thought, ‘Wow, I’m just that wild one that wakes up in the middle of the night laughing hysterically or sobbing or in front of people.’ Just very moody.”
Though she was prescribed “really strong antidepressants from a really young age,” Blair said she turned to alcohol to cope with her “hell.”
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“I drank because I felt so other,” she shared. “I just went in the basement, and I drank from a really young age. I was 7 from when it all kind of started, and I stayed drunk. I’d have a few years off and on, and I didn’t do it at work because I am my mother’s child, and I’m a functioning — you know, it’s really important to me — but I was miserable.”
She added that her “entire social life was quite thwarted” because “you just don’t learn things when you’re not in your body.”
Finally, at the age of 46, Blair received her MS diagnosis and felt as though a weight had been lifted.
“I was relieved I finally had something that could be understood and then treated,” she told Welker, adding that it took her “another year to realize a lot of [her] childhood symptoms were MS.”
Though Blair is in remission following extensive treatment, she still experiences symptoms of the unpredictable disease, which affects the central nervous system by disrupting the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and body.
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