Emilia Clarke has opened up on the stress she put on herself to ‘force’ herself to feel better following her brain aneurysm.
The Game Of Thrones star suffered a life-threatening brain haemorrhage between seasons one and two of the HBO show in 2011.
Years after keeping her medical emergency and recovery out of the spotlight, Emilia chose to reveal all in a personal essay for The New Yorker.
She wrote how she suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage – a rare but life-threatening type of stroke – while she was working out with a personal trainer at the gym.
Emilia underwent surgery and suffered horrendous memory loss for a short time after the episode, suffering anxiety and fatigue as she attempted to feel ‘normal’ again.
Now she’s keen to spread the message of the seriousness of strokes as her charity SameYou partnered with the Royal College of Nursing Foundation, shedding more light on how she continued to recover.
‘That strain exhausted me more than anything, forcing myself to feel okay,’ she said this week.
‘If I can help a young person who was in the state I was in, I know they would be lifted and feel lighter in themselves.
‘The ability to feel open and vulnerable when you’re just making your mark, when you don’t want to seem vulnerable, is important.’
Emilia added her goal was to make sure young people have others around them ‘they can feel vulnerable and open with’ during their recovery.
Drawing upon her own personal experiences she added: ‘I have an incredibly personal experience with nurses. There’s currently a lack of eyes on brain injury recovery.
‘It’s the thing that brings people back to life. It’s the thing that gives people back their life.’
The star said that as well as a stroke not being something one may expect to happen to someone in their 20s or 30s, the ‘mental health aspect’ of the condition affected her immensely.
She added: ‘I was cared for by two specialist nurses, but I saw where the gaps were and where I had to help myself.’
In March Emilia recalled the moment she suffered the potentially-fatal aneurysm.
The British actress wrote: ‘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, and 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.
The actress spent four days in an intensive care unit following a three-hour surgery, however it wasn’t entirely successful and she struggled to remember her name as she suffered from a condition known as aphasia.
‘In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,’ she continued.
‘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 ICU and, after about a week, the aphasia passed. I was able to speak.’
However a brain scan in 2013 revealed that a second aneurysm had doubled in size and required another operation, which failed and Emilia suffered a ‘massive bleed’ forcing doctors to operate again, this time accessing her brain through her skull.
The actress suffered from anxiety and panic attacks and felt like a ‘shell of [herself].’
Emilia revealed that her health has improved in the years since ‘beyond [her] most unreasonable hopes’ and it now at ‘a hundred per cent’.
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