Sopranos actress reveals 15-year battle with the disease.
Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler has revealed she has been secretly suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) for almost 15 years.
The newly married actress married baseball player Cutter Dykstra in California over the weekend. She was diagnosed with the disease when she was only 20 years old. A year before that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease.
She told People magazine “I wasn’t ready until now… You’d think that after all these years, somebody would be settled with something like this, but it’s still hard to accept.”
She had decided to go public about her illness because of her new husband and their two-year-old son Beau. She said, “I think I’m at a point in my life with my son, with my new marriage, it’s a new me and I want to live my truth. I don’t want to hold a secret where it feels like I have something to be ashamed of or have something to hide… It’s part of who I am, but it’s not who I am… I didn’t want him (Beau) to get to an age where he felt like he had to keep this secret for me as well… I wanted to be an example to him of strength and courage.”
She went on, “It was a shock, it was surprising… to get the diagnosis was confusing but also strange because I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel like anything was really wrong. At the time my ideas of MS were limited… I thought it meant wheelchair, I thought it meant your life was over. And so there began my almost 15 years of being in denial… I didn’t want to believe that was going to be my future.”
She admitted that her symptoms had been bad over the past ten years but she hide it from film and TV bosses, saying:
“Sometimes all I needed was like five or 10 minutes to sit and recharge but I wouldn’t ask, because I didn’t want them to be suspicious,” she says. “I can’t walk for a long period of time without resting. I cannot run. No superhero roles for me… Stairs? I can do them but they’re not the easiest. When I walk, I have to think about every single step, which is annoying and frustrating.”
The 34-year-old actress takes medication for the incurable condition. She says this has kept her symptoms stable for past six years. She said: “Things are manageable now… It takes a fighting attitude to deal with all this. This disease can absolutely take over your life if you let it.”