Selma Blair Wasn't Panicked By Her MS Diagnosis, But Relieved

Selma Blair announced that she has multiple sclerosis last October, but many fans (myself included) weren’t aware of her diagnosis until she appeared on the Vanity Fair Oscar red carpet with a cane.

Now she’s talking about her diagnosis for the first time, giving an interview to ABC News. Blair’s speech is shaky and spastic throughout as she explains her life living with MS, but she says that when she first found out she had it she cried “not tears of panic, but tears of knowing I now had to give in to a body that had loss of control. And there was some relief in that.”

She talks about how when her son was born she was in an “MS flare-up” and was doing everything she could to seem “normal,” including self-medicating. Blair says she struggled with symptoms for years, falling down, not being able to drive home from dropping her son off at school without taking a nap, but wasn’t taken seriously by doctors.

“It’s interesting to put it out there, to be here, to say this is what my particular case looks like right now,” Blair says.