In a harrowing personal essay, “Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke revealed that she survived two life-threatening aneurysms while working on the smash HBO hit.
“Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life,” she wrote in a piece published by the New Yorker on Thursday afternoon.
Although the actress, who plays Daenerys Targaryen on the fantasy series, considered herself healthy growing up, things changed right after the then-24-year-old finished filming the first season of “Thrones.”
On Feb. 11, 2011, she became violently ill while working out with her trainer. After collapsing in the bathroom, she was rushed to the hospital. There she received an MRI showing she had suffered a “subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.”
Following a four-day stay in the hospital after her first “minimally invasive” surgery, Clarke experienced aphasia, an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of brain damage.
“I was sent back to the I.C.U. and, after about a week, the aphasia passed,” she wrote. “I was able to speak. I knew my name — all five bits. … One month after being admitted, I left the hospital, longing for a bath and fresh air. I had press interviews to do and, in a matter of weeks, I was scheduled to be back on the set of ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Despite feeling “deeply unsure of myself,” Clarke went back to work, trying not to show that she was struggling, and feeling “every minute of every day I thought I was going to die,” but she managed to get through it. Then in 2013, while having a brain scan in New York, Clarke found out that a second aneurysm doctors had found during her first surgery had doubled in size, requiring an operation.
“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain,” 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.”
She continued, “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 Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium.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.”
As difficult as the recovery was, both physically and emotionally, Clarke wrote that she’s now back to 100 percent. She even started a charity, Same You, to help people recovering from strokes and other brain injuries.
“There is something gratifying, and beyond lucky, about coming to the end of ‘Thrones,’” she concluded. “I’m so happy to be here to see the end of this story and the beginning of whatever comes next.”