Christina Applegate: Holding Sadie to My Chest the 'Best Thing'

"I dropped my gown, which I don't do," Applegate, 39, says in an interview airing Tuesday on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. "This part of my body is very private to me ... that's a real private place. A place that I don't have a good relationship with, let's say. But at that moment of pulling her out, I just tore that off."

The moments after childbirth were extraordinarily profound for Christina Applegate, who dropped her defenses and pulled daughter Sadie Grace to her chest, a part of her body that she’s kept closely guarded since her double mastectomy in 2008.

“I dropped my gown, which I don’t do,” the Hall Pass star, 39, says in an interview airing Tuesday on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “This part of my body is very private to me … that’s a real private place. A place that I don’t have a good relationship with, let’s say. But at that moment of pulling her out, I just tore that off.”

It was a sign of just how open she was to her new daughter. “There’s a room full of people that I don’t know. Nurses and doctors,” says Applegate — this week’s PEOPLE cover girl, along with Sadie. “And she and I just lay there. It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

The actress and her fiancé, musician Martyn LeNoble, welcomed Sadie on Jan. 27 in Los Angeles, after a lengthy labor.

“It was about 18 hours,” Applegate says. “I had my plan. Plans are a big joke, you know. [Mine] was to have an epidural but I didn’t react to it well … I didn’t like the feeling of numbness. I didn’t like it. It was really creepy to me. It was too much so we turned it off and we opted to go all the way. It was profound. It was profound pain.”

— Tim Nudd