Emilia Clarke’s brain aneurysm
Emilia Clarke, who filmed battle scenes for Game of Thrones, published an essay in The New Yorker in 2019 titled “A Battle for My Life.”
After suffering a severe headache at the gym, the actress writes, “I made it to the bathroom and fell to my knees feeling very, very sick.” “During that time, the pain was getting worse with shooting, stabbing, squeezing pain. 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 swift and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space around the brain,” the Emmy nominee added. “I had an aneurysm or a ruptured artery.”
Emilia immediately underwent surgery to close the aneurysm, citing the “unbearable pain.” During her recovery, she continued, she experienced aphasia and was “muttering nonsense.”
After a week, Emilia added, “the aphasia subsided,” and she was discharged from the hospital a month later.
At a brain scan in 2013, she learned the growth had “doubled in size” and required surgery again.
“When they woke me up I was screaming in pain,” she wrote. “The operation was unsuccessful. I lost a lot of blood. The doctors made it clear that my chances of survival were in jeopardy without another operation. This time they had to access my brain the old-fashioned way: through my skull.”
Thankfully, Emilia said she is now “100 percent.”
