Christina Applegate’s daughter diagnosed with POTS: ‘In a lot of pain’

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Christina Applegate’s daughter Sadie has revealed she is battling postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a circulatory disorder that can make sufferers feel faint and dizzy.

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Applegate’s 13-year-old daughter made the revelation when she appeared as a guest on a recent episode of her mother’s MeSsy podcast, which she hosts alongside her pal Jamie-Lynn Sigler.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, POTS is a condition that causes a number of symptoms when you go from lying down to standing up, such as a fast heart rate, dizziness and fatigue.

“It affects my heart, and so when I stand up, I get really, really dizzy, and my legs get really weak, and I feel like I’m going to pass out,” Sadie explained (per PEOPLE). “I have fainted before, and I have gone unconscious.”

Sadie said she was diagnosed with the condition several months ago, but has been living with the affliction “for a long time.” During her conversation, she recounted how she would go to the school nurse “multiple times a day” when she was in the sixth grade because she always felt lightheaded, even though her symptoms weren’t taken seriously.

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“Every time I went to the nurse, they thought I was lying,” she said. “They were like, ‘You’re doing this to get out of class, it’s probably just anxiety, go back to class.’ They wouldn’t do anything for it, and that definitely was hard, because I genuinely felt so sick, and I was in a lot of pain.”

She added, “Them not doing anything about it definitely hurt me, physically and emotionally. Because I was just like, ‘This is rude and I feel sick and you’re telling me to go to PE and run laps around the football field. I can’t do that.’”

Applegate said she felt “guilty” for not recognizing what was going on with her daughter.

“She wears layers of clothes on 90 degree days and she hates PE … I was like, ‘Oh, I kind of felt that way too.’ I feel so horrible that we didn’t pay attention to it,” she said (per Us Weekly). “I just didn’t see it at home, babe. At home you were fine. But it’s kind of like us,” Applegate said, referencing her and Sigler’s battles with MS. “We get out in the world, and the stresses and the anxiety of the world bring upon our symptoms much worse then they would be if we were in the safety and the coolness of our own homes.”

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She then apologized to her daughter, saying, “I’m so sorry Sadie Grace.”

Applegate has been open about her own struggles with her health after her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis in 2021.

Earlier this month, the Dead to Me alum told Sigler, who also suffers from MS, that she was “in a depression.”

“A real, f—-it-all depression — like, a real depression, where it’s kind of scaring me too a little bit because it feels really fatalistic, it feels really ‘end of,’” she said. “I don’t mean that, but I’m trapped in this darkness right now that I haven’t felt in probably 20-something years.”

The Married … With Children star said that after being diagnosed with the disease, she doesn’t “enjoy living.” 

“I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy things anymore,” she added.

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According to the Cleveland Clinic, MS affects the central nervous system and can cause muscle weakness, vision changes, numbness and memory issues.

Sadie said it’s been hard to watch her mom battle the debilitating disease.

“When she got diagnosed, it kind of just felt like .. not like everything was over but it was hard seeing my mom lose a lot of the abilities she used to have in my childhood, When I was a kid, we would dance in her room for hours at a time,” Sadie said.

But Sadie found a silver lining to her mom’s disease, saying it’s “been nice being able to help her and support her.” 

“Every time we go to a concert, she always is like, ‘You cannot push my wheelchair, Sadie, you’re going to run into a wall,’” she said. “And I will beg. I’m just like, ‘Please, mom, let me push your wheelchair.’ Because I want to help her, so that’s definitely why I want to do it, but it’s also funny because she’s always saying, ‘No, I want this person to do it’… and it’s never me.”

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