Game of Thrones is a much-loved showed and has been for several years now. The cast has undergone some serious training in order to play their characters with perfection and suffer minimal injuries. But unfortunately, sometimes all the precautions taken in reel life are still not enough to keep the illness at bay in real life. The same is true for Emilia Clarke aka Daenerys Targaryen.
In March 2019, Emilia penned a shocking essay and in it, she shared the never-before-told story of how she survived not one but two life-threatening aneurysms. The actress suffered both incidences while filming the Game of Thrones – the first took place in February 2011, the next followed in 2013.
As reported by NBC News, in a lengthy article for The New Yorker in 2019, Emilia Clarke revealed that she suffered her first aneurysm while in the locker room of a gym in North London in February 2011. The Game of Thrones actress wrote, “I was so fatigued that I could barely put on my sneakers. When I started my workout, I had to force myself through the first few exercises. Then my trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain. I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t.”
Emilia Clarke aka Daenerys Targaryen added that after she left the workout class, she made it back to the locker room and became “violently, voluminously ill.” A woman in the locker room came over to see if the Game of Thrones actress needed help, but the thing she remembers was someone calling her parents and telling them to meet her at the hospital.
In her note to the publication, she added she was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. It also revealed that the treatment would need a “minimally invasive” surgery that did not require doctors to cut open her skull. The Game Of Thrones actress added that over the next month, she was hospitalized and suffered from vision issues, “unbearable” pain, and memory loss.
Emilia Clarke revealed, “I’d never experienced fear like that — a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.” According to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, aneurysms are fatal in about 40 per cent of cases and of those who survive, just over 60 per cent suffer a permanent neurological deficit. About 15 per cent of people who had a brain aneurysm die before reaching the hospital.
The Game Of Thrones actress added that she suffered a second brain aneurysm in 2013 while in New York for a play she was in. After undergoing a brain scan, Emilia Clarke said she was told that she had the growth on the side of her brain – that she became aware of during her first hospital stay had, “doubled in size” and required surgery. She noted, “This time they needed to access my brain in an old-fashioned way — through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately.”
Clarke said that the procedure left her looking as though she had “been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced.” But she added, “I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium,” she wrote.
The Game Of Thrones actress concluded by saying that these incidents led her to take up another passion besides acting — helping people recovering from brain injuries and stroke through a charity she helped develop called SameYou.
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