LOS ANGELES-As the cast of Game of Thrones continues to get everyone excited about the final season, Emilia Clarke has taken the opportunity to open up about how she suffered two brain aneurysms after she first started the show.
The British actress, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the popular show, opened up about suffering a subarachnoid haemorrhage when she was just 24 after feeling pressure on her brain while working out with a personal trainer in 2011.
“I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t. I told my trainer I had to take a break. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill,” Clarke wrote in The New Yorker.
Clarke explained how a woman found her and put her in the recovery position before calling an ambulance and informing her parents, who were in Oxfordshire.
Clarke wrote: “The diagnosis was swift and ominous: A subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”
In order to survive, Clarke had to undergo surgery immediately. While the surgery was a success, the side effects were difficult to handle for Clarke, including pain and trouble with memory and cognitive responses.
“I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name… I was suffering from a condition called aphasia, a consequence of the trauma my brain had suffered.”
This would also not be the last time she’d go into surgery.
After season 3 Emilia’s regular brain scans revealed a growth on the other side of her brain, large in size and actively growing.
Clarke states, “I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in an old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately.”
Fearing for her life, the star admitted that she had lost all hope and was convinced that she won’t be able to make it.
“But I survived… In the years since my second surgery, I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. I am now at a hundred per cent.”
She adds, “There is something gratifying, and beyond lucky, about coming to the end of Thrones. I’m so happy to be here to see the end of this story and the beginning of whatever comes next.”
Clarke has helped to develop the charity SameYou, which helps to provide treatment for people recovering from brain injuries and stroke.
