Jamie-Lynn Sigler Breaks Silence On Near Death Experience

Actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler is opening up about a health scare she had about a year ago.

“The Sopranos” star recently shed light on her near-death experience for the first time during an emotional episode of her podcast. She and co-host Christina Applegate bonded over the need for therapy amid their multiple sclerosis battle.

It is not surprising that Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s health scare didn’t reach the public as she quietly dealt with MS for almost 15 years before announcing her condition.

Sigler addressed her near-death experience on her “MeSsy” podcast, revealing she suffered from post-surgery complications while living at an ashram in India. She noted she had “felt so awakened and connected and peaceful” until:

“Two weeks later, I had a very bad reaction to a surgery and got sepsis and was in the hospital and almost died…Two weeks after a year ago, right now, I was in a hospital literally, like, this much away from death.”

Sigler confessed that she never told anyone about her health scare and refused to shed light on the surgery she had. However, she noted that this was one of the incidents that defined 2023 as her “year of grieving” and motivated her to turn to therapy.

According to Sigler, nearly dying broke her in more ways than one. However, she refused to wallow, tackling her emotions head-on with professional help, friends, and a brave heart.

“I had never in my life been moresad, felt more low.But what I learned from India was I had an inability to escape it. I had to sit in it,” she recalled, adding:

“I would scream in pillows. I would cry to girlfriends… I reached out. I sat by myself, I got a therapist, I did all of these things I had never really done before, and went through this process that was absolutely necessary.”

Sigler used her experience to motivate her co-host to join therapy, stressing that the benefits outweighed her fear of seeking professional help. Applegate had confessed to no longer enjoying living amid her battle with multiple sclerosis.

“I’m in a depression right now, which I don’t think I’ve felt that for years,” Applegate admitted, “Like a real, f-ck-it-all depression where it’s kind of scaring me, too, a little bit because it feels really fatalistic.”

“I’m trapped in, like, this darkness right now that I haven’t felt [in], like, I don’t even know how long, probably 20-something years,” the 52-year-old lamented, noting she was “so afraid” of therapy because she didn’t want to cry.

As stated, Sigler kept her MS diagnosis private for nearly 15 years before revealing her condition in 2016. The Blast reported she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 20, shocking many given the debilitating symptoms attached to the autoimmune disease.

Sigler addressed what it was like living with MS in an emotional interview, referencing people’s remarks about how she managed to keep her condition for so long. In her words:

“I don’t want to say it frustrates me when people say, ‘You don’t look sick,’ because I agree, and I understand—and I don’t feel sick, sitting here in front of you.”

Sigler explained that she had to make adjustments in her life because of MS for her to thrive independently. However, that didn’t mean she escaped living with the disease without challenges.

In an interview, Sigler opened up about having “bad days” amid her MS battle. These negative moments came from the emotions attached to her condition and the publicity following the revelation of her diagnosis.

“I think what has happened is that for me, it was so much about fighting it and keeping it a secret and covering it up. And then, when I became public about it, then it was accepting that people knew,” the actress explained.

Sigler continued saying, “And now it’s sort of shifted into this thing where I think people don’t realize, they think with chronic illness it’s so much the physical stuff and the way it affects you physically, but emotionally it can really affect you even more.”