Most people will have maybe a couple on their spine. I have none on my spine, but more than thirty on my brain.
“What are you saying to me?” I said.
“You have multiple sclerosis.”
I didn’t cry. Instead, in shock, I said, “Okay, thank you very much.” I closed the laptop.
I’ve said elsewhere that dread things follow dream things in my life. I should have called this chapter “From Helen Mirren to Thirty Lesions.”
I texted the creator of the show, Liz Feldman; our unit production manager; and the producers.
“Guys,” I typed, “we have an answer to why I’ve been having trouble on set. It’s MS.”
The initial sorrow and sympathy were immediately followed by them shutting the shooting week down. That was so hard for me to hear. I had always prided myself on being a workhorse.
“No, we keep going. We keep working,” I texted.
“Absolutely fucking not,” someone wrote. “You’re not coming to work tomorrow, if ever again if you don’t need it.”
Everyone was ordered to take a month off so that I could figure out what the fuck was going on with my life. I don’t think any other set of TV professionals would have done that. It was the most incredible group of humans. They realized it was just a TV show, something many of us might say, but which so few of us in the business ever truly believe. But they believed it, and it made all the difference.
I’d been told that my numbness was probably just peripheral neuropathy, which is a manageable condition. The real signpost of trouble had been a nerve test I’d passed. I mistakenly thought this was good news, but passing the nerve test is not a good thing. It means that there’s no damage to the nerves—duh—and that the numbness is coming from somewhere else.
After that nerve test, I think my neurosurgeon knew, but he hadn’t said anything except that he wanted to run some more tests to “rulesome things out,” hence the MRI results he shared with me on Zoom. Looking back, I know he knew. Even my chiropractor, Dr. John, knew.
I remember asking Dr. John, “Why are my toes twitching like that?”
I’ll never forget the look he gave me.
“My mom has that,” he said before quickly changing the subject. “Let’s work on some other stuff.”
We were about a month into shooting the third and final season ofDead to Mewhen I got the diagnosis. For the next few months, we all learned together how much I could do, how much I could take emotionally, spiritually, physically—all the things. My neurosurgeon wrote a letter to the producers saying that I could work only twelve hours per day, which was less than I’d ever worked in my whole life.
“If she says she needs time, you have to give her fifteen minutes,” the letter said. Sometimes I would take those fifteen minutes to go to my trailer and put my feet up, take some pain meds, cry, scream, not always in that order.
The pain I felt initially was not like it is these days: back then, it was more of an I-have-no-strength kind of pain, rather than the often excruciating agony I’m in now. I had always danced through pain and was able to do so onDead to Meto complete the season.
The filming schedule for the last season was supposed to be only ten weeks, shooting about an episode a week. If you’ve seen the show, you might imagine that the scripts for that season were changed because of my diagnosis, but the truth is, those scripts were written a year before I got sick. Not a word was changed—the only thing thatwas changed was the blocking to lessen how much I had to walk in each scene.
We started in the summer of 2021 because James Marsden, the movie star that he is, was needed on a different project. We had to shoot the fugly twat’s scenes first for a month. (I adore this man—he knows he’s hot, I know he’s hot, everyone knows he’s hot.) Accordingly, we were shooting totally out of order, and in the end, the final season took just shy of a full year to complete.
There were some days I simply couldn’t make it to set. I remember trying to get down the stairs of my house at six o’clock in the morning, and I could make it to only the ninth stair. I know exactly how many stairs there are—six and then nine, and then two more—and I couldn’t make it any farther. I fell to the floor, dropped my bags, and waited.
I sat on that ninth stair for a while, my driver outside, but eventually I called Joe Hardesty, one of our co–executive producers and one of the loveliest people I’ve ever known.
“I can’t come,” I said to Joe. It broke me—me, the good kid who never missed a day of work in her entire life, the good girl who listened, kind to everyone, never complained, on time, and who didn’t bring her shit to work. So much so that one day years earlier, while working onMarried… with Children,I called my then agent and told her I was suffering from crippling menstrual cramps. She, in turn, called my manager to say, and I quote, “I don’t think Christina’s fit to work right now because of her mental state.” So much for female solidarity. I went to work anyway, because there was nothing wrong with my mind. I wasn’t drooling over my sorrows or talking about my difficult childhood—it was just that my uterus was on fire.
Eventually, my disability was showing up so much on camera that Netflix wondered if perhaps we needed to shut the show down—they could see my pain in the dailies and didn’t want to torture me. Even Liz Feldman suggested we end early, so understanding was she, as were the rest of the crew and cast.
“We can wrap up what we’ve done already,” she said, trying to save me from further agonies.
“No, fuck no,” I said. “We have a story to tell. We have an obligation to these two characters.”
I meant it. To me, Judy Hale and Jen Harding, the two people Linda and I embodied, were very much alive. I believed we had an obligation to finish their story.
So that’s what we did.
By the end of makingDead to Me,I had to have three people help me down the stairs of my trailer to get to my wheelchair to even get to set. I was completely stripped of my independence, my autonomy. Linda would say to me, “Whatever you want to do, I’m good. I love you. It’s more about you and your life and your health than everything else.”
