Game of Thrones star opens up about two aneurysms
Emilia Clarke suffered life-threatening stroke when she was just 24
Emilia Clarke revealed for the first time this week that she has experienced two aneurysms during her time on Game of
Thrones — and the first came when she was just 24 years old.
In an essay for the New Yorker titled “A Battle For My Life,” the actress, now 32, opened up about the life-threatening events, explaining the first aneurysm came as she was working out right after filming wrapped on Season 1 of the popular HBO series, where she plays Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons.
“I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain,” she said. “I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t.”
After being rushed to hospital, she was sent for an MRI.
“The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain,” she said. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter.”
Clarke was then transported to a neurological hospital for brain surgery.
Although the procedure was considered “minimally invasive,” Clarke says the pain afterward was “unbearable” and that it took about a week for her speech to come back properly after suffering from aphasia, a language impairment that sometimes follows strokes.
Eventually, she went back to working on Thrones with the knowledge she had a smaller growth on the other side of her brain that doctors said could “pop” at any time. She pushed through filming, despite feeling weak and exhausted.
Then, after finishing Season 3 in 2013, she took a job on Broadway. While in New York, a brain scan revealed the remaining growth had “doubled in size” and needed surgery.
The procedure had failed, however, causing a massive bleed that forced doctors to operate again “the old-fashioned way,” through her skull.
Clarke said the pain was even worse than the first surgery, leaving her in the hospital for a month to recover.
Now, Clarke says she is speaking after “keeping quiet all these years” and is looking forward to the future.
“In the years since my second surgery, I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. I am now at 100 per cent,” she said.
“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.”