Selma Blair Shares Health Update Amid Multiple Sclerosis Remission

Selma Blair is feeling "really well" after a years-long health battle.

"I've been in remission for a while," she told E! News at the Tribeca Festival screening of Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge in New York on June 5. "I just had an MRI last week. No news is good news. But I did a transplant, and it was amazing to have the bone marrow transplant." (For more from Selma's interview, watch E! News June 6 at 11 p.m.)

The Cruel Intentions star also expressed her support for Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Christina Applegate, who've spoken about living with multiple sclerosis on their podcast MeSsy.

"They're being really open about their experiences," she said, noting that they discuss topics people previously shied away from. "I love that they're doing that. They're both good friends of mine. I love listening to them hang out and discover."

Selma was diagnosed with MS in 2018 and underwent a stem cell transplant the following year. In 2021, the Legally Blonde actress—who detailed her journey in her documentary Introducing, Selma Blair and memoir Mean Baby—announced she's in remission.

"I'm so much better, but it haunts my physical cells. It's there," she explained to Self in a January 2023 cover story. "Some people wake up two years later and they're like, 'I'm healed! Colors are brighter!' But I never had that moment. I just stopped having regression."

Since then, Selma—who's become an advocate for a more accessible world—has continued to update fans on how she's doing.

"The MS is fine," the 51-year-old said in a January Instagram video. "I'm still in remission. I'm due for another MRI and blood work, but I seem to be doing fine."

Although, she noted she still experiences some of the symptoms.

"I still get tired," she continued. "I still am stiff like all the time. If I'm by myself, I do move and walk better and in open space. But still I noticed, when I go out, it's still very pronounced. When I go into different rooms, hallways or meeting new people or even talking about it." 

Selma has also shared more about her diagnosis with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic condition that affects connective tissue, and how "I hurt all the time." 

"The Ehlers-Danlos will make me really, really, really stiff because I'll pull my muscles too easily and then they're like slack and sit there so I get some injuries," she added earlier in the video. "This is nothing that's like horrible, scary stuff or anything. It's one of those extra things that turns into a chronic thing and you have to watch."

And she expressed how she takes it day by day. 

"I'm a beginner every day, so it's like Groundhog Day," Selma said. "And I am doing really well. There's no complaining. But I don't know if I'll ever have the coordination or balance or stamina that I want to. Still lucky, still grateful, still OK, but still a bummer."

To learn more about her journey, keep scrolling and read some of the details she shared in her book.

- Reporting by Ashley Bellman 

Selma Blair keeps cell phone video diaries and one from June 2018, two months before her diagnosis, showed that she was struggling to write and text. She thought the muscle spasms she'd been having—including one in her left leg that affected her stride when she walked in Christian Siriano's Fall/Winter 2018 show at New York Fashion Week that March—might have something to do with horseback riding, her favorite pastime.

In fact, she reveals, she'd felt off since the birth of her son, Arthur, in 2011. 

Doctors told her "it's just sadness, you're a mom, you're overwhelmed," she recalls of the attempts she made to find out what was wrong, her symptoms dismissed as manifestations of postpartum depression.

Blair was emotionally fragile, though, after Arthur was born, and she recalls how her own mother, Molly (whom she greatly resembles), had told her that she wasn't marriage or mom material.

It turns out the actress' bittersweet relationship with her at times shockingly critical mother—who died last year during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing Blair from being able to travel to Detroit to be with her family—has shadowed her entire existence. Despite having every reason to want to distance herself (Molly's main reaction to her daughter's big break in Cruel Intentions was to ask why she had to use so much tongue in her kiss with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Blair loves her all the same. She muses that her mom—who sounds as if she suffered from depression—may not have encouraged her in order to toughen her up. As in, life isn't going to be your friend, so you better figure it out on your own.

She wonders if she understands where her mom was coming from "because my brain is hijacked sometimes, too."

Getting a diagnosis was an improvement over not knowing, she recalls, because then at least she could move forward. But then she was left with the reality of her worsening physical ailments, and it soon became apparent to her that her medications weren't helping. According to her assistant Bonny Burke, one of the confidantes we hear from in the film, it was actress Jennifer Grey who brought up stem cell transplants, telling Blair that her friend's brother had been cured of an autoimmune disorder after undergoing the procedure at Northwestern.

After considering her options, Blair decides to go for it, ignoring the insistence from an unnamed friend that she wouldn't survive the process. 

Blair is seen having good days and bad, sometimes barely needing the cane as she scales a rocky slope on her Studio City, Calif., property, while at other times her mobility is visibly limited. She basks in the normalcy of being able to cut strawberries on her own in June 2019, "all very new, because I could not do this a couple months ago."

As we see her tender interactions with Arthur, who is obviously the most important part of her life, Blair reflects on blacking out while on a flight with her son (luckily he was sleeping with headphones on, she notes) and his father, her ex Jason Bleick, in 2016—an embarrassing incident that she immediately publicly apologized for, and which prompted her to never take another drink.

"It is the worst thing I've ever done as a parent and thank god nobody was hurt," she says. "Thank goodness I had the sense to be such a self-destructive fool while his father was there."

She also remembers being in pain on that trip, leading to her mixing a pill and booze, one of several instances that leave her wondering whether MS had been encroaching on her life for years before her diagnosis.

Before she goes to Chicago for the stem cell transplant—a multi-step process that only begins with preliminary chemotherapy—she lets Arthur buzz her hair off so he'd be less shocked by seeing her without it upon her return. 

After the initial chemo, her treatment includes a rigorous personal evaluation in which doctors purposely mess with her head to test her resilience, giving herself injections to get ready for her cells to be harvested and then five days of intense chemo and isolation at the hospital. On the last day, Blair wanly celebrates that tomorrow will be "my new body's birthday."

She undergoes the transplant, which is followed by the engraftment period, while they wait for the cells to latch on. "My mouth tastes like dirty pennies," she observes in one scene, then gamely takes a lint-roller to her bald head in another. Nine days after the transplant, she's playing with the baby hands and trying out her best Fosse moves, cane in hand. And then after 19 days of isolation, she's discharged.

Then comes the overwhelming sense of unfairness (for us, let alone for her!) that what she just went through didn't completely cure her. Not overnight, and not even months later, when Blair admits she's "judging the process," depressed that she's still struggling with balance, her vision and almost everything else that was bothering her before.

An encounter with cancer survivor Robin Roberts at the TIME 100 Health Summit makes her feel better, the Good Morning America anchor sharing that it took two years before she really felt right after undergoing a bone marrow transplant to treat a rare blood disorder.

Setbacks abound, including finding out for the first time from a doctor in Los Angeles that her brain's gray matter—which affects muscle control, memory, speech and emotions—is damaged, something no other doctor had ever brought up, she says, throughout all those tests and scans she'd had.

But when the film catches up with Blair in the spring and summer of 2020, she's unmistakably doing better, enjoying the company of friends during an intimate birthday party in her backyard and swimming with Arthur.

Not, however, that she doesn't still have her days where she's laid low by what she can't do yet, and going out in public remains far more stressful on her body and mind than chilling at home. When she makes her long-awaited return to riding, she's upset that she only has enough energy for 10 seconds of trotting at a time. 

"But the fact that you can do it for 10 seconds, like think about that," her instructor reassures her. "Think about how long it's been since you've been able to do something like that for 10 seconds, it's incredible."

Like the ability to gracefully slice a strawberry, every bit of progress is a step in the right direction.

She says at one point that she can't believe she's a disabled person who's out there helping other disabled people, but that being able to help anyone—even if it's just to make them less self-conscious about using a cane—has given her life purpose.

"I'm embarrassed to say, I'm at peace," she says in the film's final sequence as she jumps into her freshly resurfaced swimming pool wearing her mother's "magician dress," an item Molly never let her daughter try on while she was alive, making it even more fraught with meaning after she died. Blair sheds the garment underwater, leaving that piece of her past languishing at the bottom of the pool while she glides off into her future.

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