Emilia Clarke’s Battle with a Brain Aneurysm
Emilia Clarke, renowned for bringing intense battle scenes to life in Game of Thrones, revealed her own personal battle in an essay for The New Yorker in 2019, aptly titled “A Battle for My Life.”
Reflecting on a day at the gym that took a dire turn, Clarke recalled, “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—
She was taken to the hospital for 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 added. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”
Emilia had immediate surgery to seal the aneurysm, calling the pain “unbearable.” While she was recovering, she continued, she experienced aphasia and was “muttering nonsense.”
A week later, “the aphasia passed,” Emilia added, and she left the hospital a month after being admitted.
At a 2013 brain scan, she learned a growth “doubled in size” and that she needed surgery again.
“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, Emilia shared, she’s now “at a hundred per cent.”