Emilia Clarke has revealed that she almost died, after she suffered two life-threatening brain aneurysms whilst filming Game of Thrones.
In an essay for The New Yorker, entitled ‘A Battle for My Life’, the actress opened up about her health struggles.
In the piece, Emilia brings the reader back to February, 2011 – she had just finished filming the first season of Game of Thrones, and started working with a personal trainer.
“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,” she wrote.
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“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,” she continued.
“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.”
Emilia, who was just 24 at the time, was rushed to hospital and sent for an MRI straight away, “The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”
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“As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.”
The young actress was then transported to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London – where she underwent brain surgery.
She recalled, “The operation lasted three hours. When I woke, the pain was unbearable. I had no idea where I was. My field of vision was constricted. There was a tube down my throat and I was parched and nauseated.”
“They moved me out of the I.C.U. after four days and told me that the great hurdle was to make it to the two-week mark. If I made it that long with minimal complications, my chances of a good recovery were high.”
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Emilia also recalled a particularly awful night when she couldn’t remember her full name.
“I was suffering from a condition called aphasia, a consequence of the trauma my brain had suffered. Even as I was muttering nonsense, my mum did me the great kindness of ignoring it and trying to convince me that I was perfectly lucid,” she explained.
“But I knew I was faltering. In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. 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.”
Before she started filming season two of Game of Thrones, Emilia was told she had a “smaller aneurysm” on the other side of her brain – which could “pop” at any time.
Emilia wrote, “I told my bosses at ‘Thrones’ about my condition, but I didn’t want it to be a subject of public discussion and dissection. The show must go on! Even before we began filming Season 2, I was deeply unsure of myself. I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die.”
As more time passed and Emilia finished filming season three of GOT, the actress starred as Holly Golightly on Broadway in New York City.
But during that time, Emilia went to have a brain scan – and it showed that “the growth on the other side” of her brain “had doubled in size”.
Emilia was told that she needed more surgery, and recalled “screaming in pain” when she woke up.
She wrote, “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.”
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The actress spent another month in hospital, and said the recovery was “even more painful” than after her first surgery.
But thankfully, Emilia reassured her fans, “In the years since my second surgery I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. I am now at a hundred per cent.”
Emilia opened up about her struggles to shed light on the charity SameYou, which she has been working on for a “fair few years”.
The charity helps to provide treatment for people recovering from brain injuries and stroke.
