Christina Applegate had a special message for her multiple sclerosis diagnosis while attending the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Before Sunday night’s performance, the actress walked the red carpet alongside 12-year-old Sadie Grace LeNoble. The 51-year-old paired her floor-length velvet tuxedo dress with her cane because of the balance issues the illness can cause. Stickers attached the letters “FU MS” to the cane.

The consequences of Applegate’s MS, which she was diagnosed with in 2021, led her to say earlier this month that the SAG Awards would probably be her last performance.

She told The Los Angeles Times, “It’s kind of a significant deal because it’s probably my last awards ceremony as an actor. I don’t have the energy to get up at five in the morning and work for 12 to 14 hours on a set right now.

The actress from Dead to Me was given an MS diagnosis as the third season of the Netflix dramedy was being filmed. She acknowledged delaying watching her performance for several months after it was released.

I don’t like to see myself struggle, she remarked. Additionally, I put on 40 pounds as a result of drug use and inactivity, which changed the way I looked and felt.

The actress watched the program by herself when it finally started, pausing it occasionally when it became too upsetting.

“I was eventually able to step back from my own ego and appreciate what a magnificent piece of television that was,” concluded Applegate. Seeing and experiencing every scene that I wasn’t in for the first time was such a thrill.

In December, she appeared virtually on The Kelly Clarkson Show and admitted that she frequently utilizes her acting to distance herself from her personal problems.

I could escape the misery and trauma that I had probably suffered my entire life by acting, you know? Applegate stated at the time that she used acting as a coping strategy to deal with previous breakups, trauma, fatalities, and breast cancer.

For the first time, she admitted to Clarkson, going to work every day gave her the chance to grieve, enabling her to incorporate the emotions connected to her MS diagnosis into her persona.

According to Applegate, the appeal of Dead to Me “is that it provided me almost this bizarre platform to deal with it, where I didn’t have to be on all the time, I didn’t have to make all the jokes, and I could come apart in a scene.” Guess who it was, then? Me. Sadly, it was my soul practically exploding in front of the world, yet it was beautiful in a cathartic way.