Selma Blair has posted a particularly revealing selfie: She’s announcing she has multiple sclerosis.
“I am disabled. I fall sometimes. I drop things. My memory is foggy,” she wrote Saturday on Instagram, accompanied by a mirror shot of her wearing oversized glasses and a velvet jacket at a wardrobe fitting for her role on Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi drama “Another Life. “And my left side is asking for directions from a broken gps.”
Blair, 46, says she received her MS diagnosis in August after seeing actress Elizabeth Barkley’s brother, a doctor who identified lesions on her MRI.
“I have had symptoms for years but was never taken seriously until I fell down in front of him trying to sort out what I thought was a pinched nerve. I have probably had this incurable disease for 15 years at least. And I am relieved to at least know. And share.”
Selma Blair | Instagram
The National Multiple Sclerosis Society website describes MS as “an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and body.”
The cause is unknown, the site says, though the disease is believed to be triggered by an environmental factor in a person with a genetic predisposition to respond. Most people are diagnosed between ages 20 and 50, and women are two to three times more likely to receive the diagnosis.
She gave a shout-out to her celebrity pals Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze and Jaime King for supporting her through the news.
“I am in the thick of it but I hope to give some hope to others. And even to myself,” she wrote. “I want my life to be full somehow. I want to play with my son again. I want to walk down the street and ride my horse. … If you see me, dropping crap all over the street, feel free to help me pick it up. It takes a whole day for me alone.”
Other celebrities living with MS include Joan Didion, Montel Williams, Clay Walker, Jack Osbourne, Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Teri Garr.
