David Faustino, 52, told Us Weekly in an interview published June 11 that watching his Married… With Children co-star battle multiple sclerosis has been hard – but that her humor has never once wavered. He called her diagnosis “a real blow” and said she has kept her “dry, sarcastic sense of humor since the moment I met her.” His verdict: “Nothing has changed… She gets through this with some humor, and that’s kind of her way that she moves through it.”
For anyone who has been following Christina Applegate’s health in recent months, Faustino’s words land with some weight. The actress, 54, has been largely out of the public eye since her MS diagnosis in 2021, and her updates have mostly arrived through her podcast, through social media, or through the people closest to her. A former co-star stepping forward to say she’s still herself, still funny, still very much present – that matters, in a way that a standard celebrity health bulletin never quite does.
Faustino and Applegate go back a long way. The two played siblings Kelly and Bud Bundy on Married… With Children, which aired on Fox from 1987 to 1997. The on-screen dynamic was sibling rivalry turned into a decade of physical comedy. What the friendship has become off-screen, in the years since, is something more personal.
The Friendship That Outlasted the Show
Faustino said he has been “a support” to Applegate since she announced her diagnosis and that he stays in regular contact with her, visiting often, texting, and checking in. He described it simply: “A lot of funny just crap that we talk about. And that’s all I can do, right?” He added that they “have deep convos when we sit,” but also keep the laughter going as well.
That combination of depth and lightness is exactly what Applegate has said she needs. MS is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the protective coating around nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord. As neuroimmunologist Dr. Parisa Khosravi explained to the Austin American-Statesman, “The immune system gets confused and attacks the myelin sheath around the nerves.” That myelin sheath helps transmit signals quickly from nerves to muscles, and when it is damaged, those signals slow down, leading to symptoms ranging from numbness and fatigue to serious mobility problems. There is no cure. For Applegate, the disease has steadily reshaped almost every part of her daily life over the past five years.
Faustino said he admires Applegate for being “strong in the face of this, even though it’s been a real blow.” The word “blow” doesn’t feel like an understatement when you know what her days actually look like.
What Christina Applegate’s Life With MS Actually Looks Like
Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in June 2021 and shared her illness publicly in August of that year. She later explained that she had begun experiencing symptoms – including leg buckling and numbness – up to seven years before receiving an official diagnosis. Looking back now, those years on set at Dead to Me read differently. She recalled falling on the day she was filming a scene in a field. “Hi, first signs of MS,” she said. “So, not to bring everybody down, but there it was.”
Since the diagnosis, the physical toll has been relentless. In her 2026 memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, she described waking up unable to move her arm far enough to grab a glass of water. She is prone to infection, and her stomach issues have sent her to the emergency room regularly. On her MeSsy podcast in March 2025, Applegate revealed she had been hospitalized “upwards of 30 times” due to intense MS symptoms – “throwing up and diarrhea and pain.”
She has spoken about nights when she wants to walk down the hall to say goodnight to her teenage daughter, Sadie, but her legs simply won’t cooperate. The experience, she said, has “broken” her daughter in a way that has grown harder as Sadie has gotten older.
She has also disclosed that she has 30 lesions on her brain, with the largest one located behind her right eye, causing chronic pain there.
Beyond the physical symptoms, there has been a frank reckoning with what the illness has taken. When asked about better days, Applegate put it plainly: “I’m never good, I’m just less shitty.”
The April Hospitalization
In April 2026, it was reported that Applegate had been hospitalized in Los Angeles, admitted in late March, though the exact reason for her stay remained unclear and it was not confirmed whether the hospitalization was directly related to her MS. Her representatives declined to comment at the time, stating only: “I have no comment on whether she is in the hospital or what her medical treatments are.”
It wasn’t her first extended hospital stay in recent memory. In August 2025, she had been hospitalized after a bilateral kidney infection, recording a live episode of her MeSsy podcast from her hospital bed – a move that was so classically Applegate that it became a story in its own right.
After the April 2026 reports surfaced, Applegate broke her silence on Instagram. The message read: “Health issues are a constant for me, but I’m a strong chick and I’m getting stronger and better every day.” She shared the post alongside a photo of a coffee mug resting on top of her memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.
An unnamed insider told reporters around the same time that Applegate experiences “better days and really bad days,” but added that “she doesn’t have great days,” while noting that she continues to fight through difficult moments with the support of the people around her.
The Memoir, the Podcast, and the Decision to Keep Talking
Applegate has been unusually open about all of this, and that openness has been deliberate. She has channeled much of her experience into her 2026 memoir, You With the Sad Eyes, as well as into the MeSsy podcast she co-hosts with actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who also lives with MS.
Before her MS diagnosis, Applegate had already survived a 2008 breast cancer diagnosis. After learning she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation – which raises the risk of both breast and ovarian cancer – she underwent a double mastectomy and later had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. She has been carrying a significant medical history for a long time, and she has never especially softened it for public consumption.
“My life isn’t wrapped up with a bow,” she told People in an interview timed to her memoir’s release. “People’s lives, sorry for lack of a better term, f—ing suck sometimes. So I’m being as honest and raw as I possibly can.”
The MeSsy podcast has become one of the more unusual ongoing conversations in celebrity media because of exactly that honesty. Sigler has lived with the disease for over two decades and brings a different vantage point than Applegate, who is still relatively early in her own journey. Together, the two have built something that goes beyond the standard “celebrity health journey” feature – part therapy, part comedy, part candid documentation of what the day-to-day reality of a changing body actually looks like.
“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life,” Applegate has said publicly. “I hate it so much, and I’m so mad about it.” She has also, in other moments, been clear that the anger is something she keeps choosing rather than something she is stuck with. The choice, it turns out, takes its own kind of strength.
The People Who Don’t Leave
One of the things that comes through consistently in every recent update about Applegate – from Faustino, from her own words, from the people around her – is that she hasn’t gone through this alone. Her daughter, Sadie. Her co-host, Sigler. Her Married… With Children cast members, who reunited in January 2026 for a live event at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. Faustino organized the reunion, which brought together Applegate, Ed O’Neill, and Katey Sagal for the first time in years.
Applegate rarely leaves the house. She still managed to show up.
In February 2026, Applegate revealed she had largely been confined to her bed due to ongoing pain, but said she still tries to take her daughter to school. “I want to take her; it’s my favorite thing to do.” That line, more than almost anything else she has said publicly about MS, captures where she actually is. Not where she wants to be. Not where she was. But still reaching for the ordinary things that used to be ordinary, because her daughter is on the other end of them.
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Still Herself
MS is unpredictable in ways that make it particularly hard to write about, or to follow from the outside. The disease doesn’t move in a straight line. Some days are worse than others for reasons nobody can fully predict, and the gap between a good day and a bad one can be the difference between sitting at a table and not being able to get out of bed. Applegate is usually seen in public with a cane now. That cane has itself become a kind of marker – the first time she appeared publicly with one, in October 2022, she posted photos of four different options on Instagram and wrote that “walking sticks are now part of my new normal.”
What Faustino’s update adds to the picture, beyond the reassurance that Applegate is still fighting, is something simpler. She is still herself. The humor she brought to Kelly Bundy, the comic precision she had in Dead to Me, the willingness to say the blunt, uncomfortable true thing in an interview – none of that has gone anywhere. MS has cost her mobility and energy. Getting down a hallway requires planning now. But it hasn’t touched the thing that seems to matter most to the people who know her.
Some illnesses isolate people by taking their capacity to connect. Applegate’s story keeps pushing back against that. A former TV sibling texting funny things because that’s what she needs. A podcast co-host who has had the disease twice as long and knows exactly what to say. A daughter she drives to school on the days she can. These are not grand gestures. They are the small, repeated acts that hold a life together, even when the body makes everything harder than it should be.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.