From BZ/dpa
US actress Emma Caulfield Ford (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) tells of her life with multiple sclerosis (MS).
The first symptoms appeared in 2010, the 49-year-old said in a Vanity Fair interview published on Tuesday (local time).
“I woke up one morning and the left side of my face felt like a million ants were crawling on it.”
MS is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that affects the brain and spinal cord. It usually occurs in early adulthood. Her father also suffered from the disease, Caulfield Ford said. He died a few years ago, but not from MS.
In the film industry, she kept her illness a secret for a long time. “I knew full well that if I spoke about it, I wouldn’t be working anymore.”
Only her parents and her husband would have known about it. She now wants to change this, also because it is becoming more difficult to deal with impairments caused by the disease. For example, she tolerates the summer heat in California less and less, which was also noticed during the shooting of the Marvel series “WandaVision”.
“I’m so tired of not being honest,” the actress said. She also doesn’t want to hide anything from her six-year-old daughter. On the set of her new series “Agatha: Coven of Chaos” she is open about the disease. She can work, she just has to be careful because of the heat.