Emilia Clarke’s Battle with a Brain Aneurysm
Emilia Clarke, known for her intense battle sequences in Game of Thrones, revealed a personal battle in 2019 through an essay published in The New Yorker titled “A Battle for My Life.”
Recalling a severe headache during a workout, Clarke described her experience: “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and was violently, voluminously ill,” she shared. “The pain—sharp, stabbing, and constricting—intensified. Deep down, I understood the reality: my brain was in trouble.”
Following this harrowing episode, she was rushed to the hospital for an urgent brain scan.
“The diagnosis was swift and grim: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a deadly type of stroke resulting from bleeding into the area surrounding the brain,” Clarke explained. “I’d suffered 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.”