Game Of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke has opened up about her terrifying ordeal of suffering two brain aneurysms that required life-changing surgery eight years ago.
The 32-year-old actress, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO show, has revealed her devastating health problems for the first time in a powerful essay for The New Yorker.
Emilia recalls how the issues started when she felt unwell during a training session not long after wrapping up filming for season one of Game Of Thrones in 2011.
The British actress writes: ‘My trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain.’
She tried to ignore the pain and continue with the workout but it became more difficult. Emilia reveals how she then had to ‘almost crawl’ back to the locker room before sinking to her knees and becoming ‘violently, voluminously ill’.
‘Meanwhile, the pain — shooting, stabbing, constricting pain — was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged,’ she revealed.
Emilia was immediately rushed to hospital where she received a ‘quick and ominous’ diagnosis that she was had a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), which is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the area surrounding the brain.
According to the actress, a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon after the aneurysm ruptures.
She explained: ‘If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees..’
Emilia underwent a three-hour ‘minimally invasive surgery that didn’t require opening her skull, but she admits ‘the pain was unbearable’ when she woke up.
The actress spent four days in an intensive care unit recovering from the surgery, before a further week and a half.
However, the surgery wasn’t entirely successful and Emilia even struggled to remember her name after suffering from a condition known as aphasia.
‘In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,’ she reveals.
‘I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job — my entire dream of what my life would be — centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost. I was sent back to the I.C.U. and, after about a week, the aphasia passed. I was able to speak.’
Emilia eventually resumed promotion for Game Of Thrones but was often ‘so woozy, so weak’ that she thought she would lose her life.
At one point, the pain was so bad that Emilia had to take morphine between interviews for pain relief.
‘If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die,’ she stated.
Unfortunately, Emilia’s ordeal wasn’t over as a brain scan in 2013 revealed that her second aneurysm had doubled in size and required another operation.
However, the procedure failed and Emilia suffered a ‘massive bleed’ forcing doctors to operate again, this time accessing her brain through her skull.
While in recovery from the second operation, Emilia spent a month in hospital but ‘lost all hope’. The actress suffered from anxiety and panic attacks and felt like a ‘shell of [herself].’
Emilia reveals that her health has improved in the years since ‘beyond [her] most unreasonable hopes’ and it now at ‘a hundred per cent’.
Following her ordeal, Emilia has now launched a charity, SameYou, which aims to raise money for those recovering from brain surgeries and strokes.
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