Emilia Clarke's brain aneurysm
Emilia Clarke filmed battle scenes for Game of Thrones, but in 2019 she published essay in New Yorker called “Fight for My Life”.
Due to a severe headache at the gym, “I walked to the toilet, got down on my knees, and felt very, very sick,” the actress wrote. “Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, squeezing—increased. On some level I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
She was taken to the hospital for a brain scan.
“The diagnosis was quick and ominous: subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain,” the Emmy nominee added. “I had aneurysmartery rupture.”
Emilia underwent emergency surgery to close the aneurysm, calling the pain “unbearable.” While she was recovering, she continued, she developed aphasia and was “muttering nonsense.”
Within a week, “the aphasia went away,” Emilia added, and she left the hospital a month after admission.
During a brain scan in 2013, she learned that her height had “doubled” and that she would need surgery again.
“When they woke me up, I was screaming in pain,” she wrote. “The procedure was unsuccessful. I was bleeding heavily and the doctors made it clear that my chances of survival were slim unless they operated again. This time they needed access my brain the old fashioned way – through the skull.”
Luckily, Emilia shared, she is now “one hundred percent.”
