The day my world changed

In 2018, Selma Blair learned the truth about the mysterious health issue she'd battled, along with alcoholism and depression, for decades. In an exclusive extract from Mean Baby, the actress relives the moment she was told she had MS and how it would change her life.

- Selma Blair

I'd suffered from symptoms that would come and go ever since childhood. Fevers, urinary tract infections, nerve pain and numbness, depression. Symptoms I tried to dull with alcohol, but the effect was temporary. Symptoms that only grew stronger over time.

Right around the time I met Jason Bleick [father of Selma's son, Arthur, in 2010], I began to lose feeling in my legs in a way I never had before. They started to give up, inexplicably. I'd been riding again, which I loved. One day, I was walking down a hill with my horse, when out of nowhere I fell. The ground just slipped from under me.

I wasn't binge drinking then. In fact, I felt I was in a good place: Jason and I were happy, I was active, I had work. I decided, since I wasn't drinking, it must be diet-related. I hired a chef to make macrobiotic, mostly vegetarian meals, inspired by Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Life. I ate tempura and fish in special sauces, made pots of green soups. I went to chiropractors, energy workers, every kind of healer. (What's ironic to me now is that I spent so much of my life consulting experts, looking for signs, when all along there were the signs right in front of me.)

Then I got shingles. Intense nerve pain, unlike anything I'd ever experienced, shot up and down my leg, up into my hips. The shingles cleared up thanks to antivirals and rest, but I still felt unwell. My leg still gave out. Doctors told me it was postherpetic neuralgia - the body's memory of the shingles virus.