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Emilia Clarke’s Brain Aneurysm

Emilia Clarke filmed battle scenes for Game of Thrones, but in 2019, she published an essay in The New Yorker titled “A Battle for My Life.”

Experiencing a severe headache at the gym, she described, “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill.” The pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting—intensified. At some level, she recognized the severity of her condition: her brain was damaged.

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 explained. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture.”

Emilia underwent immediate surgery to seal the aneurysm, describing the pain as “unbearable.” During her recovery, she experienced aphasia and was “muttering nonsense.”

A week later, “the aphasia passed,” Emilia noted, and she left the hospital a month after being admitted.

During a 2013 brain scan, she discovered that a growth had “doubled in size,” necessitating another surgery.

“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain,” she recounted. “The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it clear 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.”

Fortunately, Emilia shared that she’s now “at a hundred percent.”