Emilia Clarke Opens Up About Surviving 2 Aneurysms
Playing Daenerys Targaryen on HBO's hit fantasy show Game of Thrones, which returns for its eighth and final season April 14, actress Emilia Clarke often seems invincible. But that's very different from the reality she lived behind the scenes while working on the series.
Clarke has written an emotional new essay for The New Yorker in which she reveals that she experienced two brain aneurysms that required immediate surgery for her to survive.
The first was discovered after Clarke had a crushing headache in the middle of a workout, followed by violent vomiting in the locker room bathroom. Describing what happened in the gym that day, Clarke writes: "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."
She was taken to Whittington Hospital, where an MRI revealed the source of Clarke's symptoms.
"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," Clarke writes of that first aneurysm. "I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. 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."
She recalls a period while in ICU when she experienced aphasia, and couldn't form coherent sentences. She went back to shooting Game of Thrones season 2 shortly after, but writes that "every minute of every day I thought I was going to die."
Even after recovering, another smaller aneurysm grew. In 2013, doctors in New York-where Clarke was appearing on Broadway-found it during a brain scan. When they tried to deal with it via surgery, the operation failed. Clarke woke up "screaming in pain."
"I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again," she writes. "This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way-through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately."
Throughout the terrifying health ordeal, Clarke was doing press for GOT and trying to put up the front of bleached-blonde, alluring, and fearless Daenerys. While she has since fully recovered, the harrowing experience left with her the knowledge of how precarious life can really be.
"On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled. Season 2 would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing," she writes. "If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die."
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