Actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler has come forward with a personal struggle she’s had for nearly 15 years.
The Sopranos star has revealed that she’s been fighting multiple sclerosis since the age of 20, when she was first diagnosed.
“I wasn’t ready until now,” Sigler told People. “You’d think that after all these years, somebody would be settled with something like this, but it’s still hard to accept.”
According to Sigler, the symptoms have really flared up over the past 10 years.
“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,” she said.
“It was a shock,” she said. “It was surprising. I had been diagnosed with Lyme disease a year before, so to get the diagnosis was confusing and 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.”
But that wasn’t true, and now she says her symptoms are at least manageable.
Multiple Sclerosis, which attacks the insulating covers of nerve cells, is nearly twice as common in women than men.