Our “Khaleesi” has almost lost her life to brain aneurysm! This is very shaking news.
“Game of Thrones” star actress, Emilia Clarke is opening up for the first time about her experience surviving two life threatening brain aneurysms as well as enduring three live-saving surgical operations. This happened in between season of the popular HBO show.
Clarke shared this in a feature on The New Yorker where she wrote about how she nearly lost her mind and her life just when her dreams were beginning to come true.
She reveals that her first episode was in the beginning of 2011 just after she had finished filming the first season of “Game of Thrones”. She wrote: “On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. 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. 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. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.
For a few moments, I tried to will away the pain and the nausea. I said to myself, “I will not be paralyzed.” I moved my fingers and toes to make sure that was true. To keep my memory alive, I tried to recall, among other things, some lines from “Game of Thrones.””
It was after a scan that it was revealed she had a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) – a life-threatening type of stroke that is caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.
She went on to write about how she felt when she got news that she had the Daenerys Targaryen role in “Game of Thrones” and her journey to success.
In a bone-chilling account, she narrated how her second surgery came to be when a growth on the other side of her brain was discovered to have grown exponentially and she was supposed to undergo what was supposed to be a simple procedure.
She wrote: “I was promised a relatively simple operation, easier than last time. Not long after, I found myself in a fancy-pants private room at a Manhattan hospital. My parents were there. “See you in two hours,” my mum said, and off I went for surgery, another trip up the femoral artery to my brain. No problem.
Except there was. When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. The procedure had failed. 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 the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately.
The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery. I looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium. These days, you can’t see the scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn’t know at first that it wouldn’t be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses. Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision? Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men. But, of course, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time.
I spent a month in the hospital again and, at certain points, I lost all hope.”
Clarke concluded her revelation saying, “After keeping quiet all these years, I’m telling you the truth in full. Please believe me: I know that I am hardly unique, hardly alone. Countless people have suffered far worse, and with nothing like the care I was so lucky to receive…. 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.”
Full feature is available on The New Yorker