Emilia Clarke Opens Up About Her Brain Aneurysm
Emilia Clarke portrayed some of Game of Thrones’ most intense battle scenes. In 2019, she revealed in a New Yorker essay titled “A Battle for My Life” that she had faced a life-threatening medical emergency of her own.
After developing a severe headache at the gym, Clarke wrote, “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill.” As the “shooting, stabbing, constricting pain” intensified, she said she realized that something was seriously wrong: “At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
She was rushed to a hospital, where doctors performed a brain scan.
“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,” the Emmy-nominated actress wrote. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”
Clarke underwent emergency surgery to seal the aneurysm, describing the pain as “unbearable.” During her recovery, she developed aphasia, a condition that affected her ability to communicate, and said she was “muttering nonsense.”
“The aphasia passed” after a week, Clarke wrote. She was discharged from the hospital about a month after being admitted.
During a brain scan in 2013, Clarke learned that another growth had “doubled in size” and that she needed a second 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.”
Thankfully, Clarke said she has since made a full recovery and is now “at a hundred per cent.”