How Selma Blair’s Brave Battle With Multiple Sclerosis Has Changed Her

It was sometime in the evening of August 16, 2018 that Selma Blair‘s life changed for good.

To be fair, it had already changed prior to that night, what with the last five years of puzzling and painful symptoms that seemed to come and go without rhyme or reason; the neck pain, the vertigo, the anxiety, the trouble walking, the crippling fatigue. There was something wrong, some great betrayal of body afoot—and yet, no one could figure out exactly what it was.

Blair heard all sorts of theories for her symptoms: Depression, hormones, the dramatic hysterics of a Hollywood actress.

But it wasn’t until a new doctor insisted on an M.R.I. (after she received a steroid shot, the only temporary solution she’d found to quell her neck pain) that she got the answers she’d been so desperate to find. After the gigantic imaging machine began to do its thing, photographing her brain, the neurologist informed Blair that the 20 lesions covering the organ meant that she was likely suffering from multiple sclerosis, a chronic and unpredictable disease of the central nervous system that disrupts its ability to communicate with the rest of the body.