Doctors Refused To Take Actress' Symptoms Seriously Until She Collapsed Right In Front of One
According to ABC News, actress Selma Blair (“Cruel Intentions,” “Hellboy”) started feeling poorly after the birth of her now-7-year-old son. In fact, “poorly” hardly does her condition justice.
Blair found herself exhausted by even the most minor tasks. After dropping her son off at school, she couldn’t manage the mile-long drive home without stopping for a nap.
“I was ashamed, and I was doing the best I could, and I was a great mother,” she said. “But it was killing me. …
“And I was self-medicating when he wasn’t with me. I was drinking. I was in pain. I wasn’t always drinking, but there were times when I couldn’t take it.”
The most frustrating part was that the medical establishment did little to help Blair. E! News reported that others blamed her condition on everything from simple fatigue to a hormonal imbalance to self-serving hysterics on her part.
That all changed when she went to Los Angeles neurologist Jason Berkley, D.O., and fell over right in front of him.
“I have had symptoms for years,” Selma wrote in an Instagram post, “but was never taken seriously until I fell down in front of [Jason Berkley] trying to sort out what I thought was a pinched nerve.”
Berkley gave her a shot of steroids in her neck that alleviated some of Blair’s discomfort. Then the physician insisted on running an MRI.
The scan discovered 20 lesions dotting her brain, a sign that she had multiple sclerosis. The results should have horrified the actress.
But that wasn’t how Blair felt at all. Instead, a sense of relief washed over her.
“When I got the diagnosis, I cried with some relief,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, good, I’ll be able to do something.’”
Blair said that the hardest part of the diagnosis was telling her son about it. “I always want him to feel safe, never responsible for me” she said, “but he had already seen that I was falling and doing things.”
When she finally shared the diagnosis with him, he nearly began to cry and said, “Will it kill you?” And Blair responded, “No. I mean, we never know what kills us, Arthur. But this is not the doctor telling me I’m dying.”
Amazingly, Blair’s physicians believe she has a remarkably good prognosis. “I’m very symptomatic,” she said.
“I have an aggressive MS. But the doctor I saw … he said within a year I could have — at the time he said 90 percent of my abilities back.”
While Blair still has a long road ahead of her, she is thankful to finally have answers after years of struggling to live her life.
“The doctor said, ‘Your life will forever be different,'” she said, recalling the day of her diagnosis. “And I was like, ‘Well, thank God.'”
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
