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Emilia Clarke Illness: What Is Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (SAH)? Emilia Clarke was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a life-threatening stroke caused by bleeding on the surface of the brain.
Emilia Clarke Illness
The Game of Thrones actress revealed she suffered subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) twice.
On February 11, 2011, when she was 24 years old. While at the gym, she had to pause her workout due to unbearable pain and made her way to the bathroom where she became sick.
“The agony was becoming greater; it was a stabbing, shooting, and restricting pain. “I realized at some point that my brain was being harmed,” the author wrote, adding that in order to keep her mind active, she began to recite lines from “Game of Thrones.”
After spotting Clarke in the restroom, a fellow gym patron called an ambulance for the actress.
After an MRI of her brain, she was diagnosed with 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.”
“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,” Clarke said.

Clarke had another surgery in 2013, the growth on the other side of my brain had doubled in size.”
During the second SAH, Emilia Clarke claims that “a portion of my brain actually died.”
“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” she stated.
“I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that,” a “Me Before You” Emily said.
What Is Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH)
A subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is an uncommon type of stroke caused by bleeding on the surface of the brain.
It occurs when there is bleeding into the space (subarachnoid space) between the inner layer (pia mater) and middle layer (arachnoid mater) of the tissues covering the brain (meninges).
It is a life-threatening disorder that can rapidly result in serious, permanent disabilities. It is the only type of stroke more common among women than among men.
When blood vessels of the brain are weak, abnormal, or under unusual pressure, a hemorrhagic stroke can occur. In hemorrhagic strokes, bleeding may occur within the brain, as an intracerebral hemorrhage. Or bleeding may occur between the inner and middle layer of tissue covering the brain (in the subarachnoid space), as a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
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Symptoms of SAH
Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) symptoms include:
- Loss of consciousness
- Nausea
- Fever
- Weakness
- Numbness
- Seizures
- A stiff neck (usually not immediately)
- Blurred vision or double vision
- Facial or eye pain
- Headache, which may be unusually sudden and severe
Causes of SAH
Causes of SAH may be due to a head injury or spontaneously, usually from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, high blood pressure, smoking, family history, alcoholism, cocaine use, and age.
Treatment can be by prompt neurosurgery or endovascular coiling