Selma Blair was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2018 but she had been experiencing symptoms long before that.
Symptoms, she says, that included unbearable pain doctors dismissed – and one did so with the suggestion she get a boyfriend for them to improve.
“I just cried,” Blair, 51, told Meet the Press‘ Kristen Welker in a new interview.
Watch the video above.
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“I had no capability to process. ‘What am I supposed to do with this information?’ I knew the pain was real. I thought it was,” she continued.
“But I did start to convince myself, ‘You’re overly sensitive. There’s nothing wrong with you. Get it together, you lazy, lazy whatever.'”
Blair, who has been in remission since 2021 and is “doing better every day”, explained in the interview she had been experiencing symptoms since she was around seven years old, and put the constant dismissal of them by doctors down to gender bias.
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“It was a gender bias, a lot of it, because there would be a boy in my grade that would go in for the exact same chronic headache and fever, and he is in surgery and a MRI within the week,” Blair said.
“I was never given a MRI even though I always had headaches and fevers and balance [problems]. But they just said, ‘Oh, just dramatic.'”
The Legally Blonde actress said the years of not being believed took a toll on her mental health, and she revealed she has “so much medical trauma” from those experiences lingering still.
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“It was hell on Earth for me,” Blair said of not being taken seriously, something she felt “until about three of five years ago”.
When she received her multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2018, however, Blair says she felt a sense of relief, of sorts. She finally had answers.
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease of the central nervous system, whereby the body attacks itself by mistake. Treatment can alleviate symptoms, but there is no cure – though periods of remission, where the symptoms improve, can be experienced.
”I was relieved I finally had something that could be understood and treated,” Blair said.
She then issued a plea to medical professionals on behalf of women, urging them to listen to all patients who report chronic symptoms.
“I really wish they would listen,” Blair said. “Nothing was taken seriously.”
