Emilia Clarke’s Brain Aneurysm
Emilia Clarke portrayed some of Game of Thrones’ most intense battle scenes. In 2019, the actress revealed in an essay for The New Yorker, 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 recalled, “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill.” The pain, which she described as “shooting, stabbing, constricting,” continued to intensify. “At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged,” she wrote.
Clarke was rushed to a hospital, where doctors ordered 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 nominee wrote. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”
Doctors performed emergency surgery to seal the aneurysm, but Clarke described the pain as “unbearable.” During her recovery, she developed aphasia and said she was “muttering nonsense.”
“The aphasia passed” after about a week, Clarke wrote. She was discharged from the hospital roughly a month after being admitted.
During a follow-up brain scan in 2013, Clarke learned that another growth had “doubled in size” and that she would need 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, surgeons had to reach her brain through her skull using a more traditional procedure.
Thankfully, Clarke said she has since made a full recovery and is now “at a hundred per cent.”