Emilia Clarke decided to reveal her health scare and how it left her body feeling rather different.
The actress said, “I’m missing quite a bit of my brain after suffering two aneurysms while I was filming Game of Thrones.”
“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,” the 35-year-old actress said.
“I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that,” she added. “There’s quite a bit missing! Which always makes me laugh. Because strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around, but then whatever bit it’s missing is therefore gone.”
Clarke says just after she finished filming the critically acclaimed Game of Thrones’ first season in 2011, she suffered her first aneurysm, which then led to a stroke and a subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Due to the health scare, Clarke had to undergo brain surgery that resulted in her being unable to remember her name.
“I was suffering from a condition called aphasia, a consequence of the trauma my brain had suffered,” she wrote in a 2019 essay for The New Yorker.
“In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug,” she continued. “I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job, my entire dream of what my life would be, centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost.”
However, after fighting through these dark moments, Clarke was able to come out on the other side since the aphasia was temporary.
“I was sent back to the ICU, and after about a week, the aphasia passed,” she wrote. “I was able to speak.”
In 2013, Clarke was faced with another aneurism that needed to be treated through surgery.
Although she was “promised a relatively simple operation,” Clarke said the second was even more harrowing than the first.
“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. 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,” she recalled in the essay.
After making a full recovery, Clarke decided to use her platform to help others who suffered similar experiences. She launched the charity SameYou to raise money for brain injury survivors and their loved ones.
