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Emilia Clarke

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Emilia Clarke Tells Her Story Of Surviving TWO Near Fatal Brain Aneurysms

Not too many people experience a cerebral aneurysm and live to talk about it, but Emilia Clarke, who portrays fan favorite Daenerys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones” recently penned her survival story for the New Yorker. The British actress actually survived not one, but TWO aneurysms.

Clarke revealed that her first near brush with death came at the close of the first season of GOT during a workout session with her trainer:

On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. I was so fatigued that I could barely put on my sneakers. When I started my workout, I had to force myself through the first few exercises.

Then my trainer had me get into the plank position, and I immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain. I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t. I told my trainer I had to take a break. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.

For a few moments, I tried to will away the pain and the nausea. I said to myself, “I will not be paralyzed.” I moved my fingers and toes to make sure that was true. To keep my memory alive, I tried to recall, among other things, some lines from “Game of Thrones.”

I heard a woman’s voice coming from the next stall, asking me if I was O.K. No, I wasn’t. She came to help me and maneuvered me onto my side, in the recovery position. Then everything became, at once, noisy and blurry. I remember the sound of a siren, an ambulance; I heard new voices, someone saying that my pulse was weak. I was throwing up bile. Someone found my phone and called my parents, who live in Oxfordshire, and they were told to meet me at the emergency room of Whittington Hospital.

Clarke was sent for an MRI and the results forced the-then 24-year-old actress to prepare for vital surgery:

Finally, I was sent for an MRI, 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. I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.

Can you imagine this being your life? At 24, you’re just finally beginning the career of your dreams only to be told you have to have surgery on your brain. Unfortunately Clarke’s wasn’t completely out of the woods. The day after her surgery she suffered a condition called aphasia, which landed her in the ICU — she made it out alive, something she says she was aware that many others in beds around hers weren’t fortunate enough to experience. She was eventually released from the hospital a month after being admitted but before leaving, doctors had more bad news for her.

I went back to my life, but, while I was in the hospital, I was told that I had a smaller aneurysm on the other side of my brain, and it could “pop” at any time. The doctors said, though, that it was small and it was possible it would remain dormant and harmless indefinitely. We would just keep a careful watch. And recovery was hardly instant. There was still the pain to deal with, and morphine to keep it at bay. I told my bosses at “Thrones” about my condition, but I didn’t want it to be a subject of public discussion and dissection. The show must go on!

While Clarke was able to complete all her work duties, she was both in pain and living in fear through the second season of the show:

On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, but I struggled. Season 2 would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.

Clarke goes on to recount how, following the third season of GOT and a run as Holly Golightly in “My Fair Lady” a now routine brain scan revealed that the growth on the other side of her brain had doubled and doctors wanted to take care of it using the same less-invasive surgery they’d used for the first aneurysm, running a wire up through her femoral artery, around her heart to seal off the aneurysm, but something went wrong during the surgery. Ultimately doctors had to go through her skull to complete the job.

The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery. I looked as though I had been through a war more gruesome than any that Daenerys experienced. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium. These days, you can’t see the scar that curves from my scalp to my ear, but I didn’t know at first that it wouldn’t be visible. And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses. Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision? Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men. But, of course, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time.

I spent a month in the hospital again and, at certain points, I lost all hope. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. There was terrible anxiety, panic attacks. I was raised never to say, “It’s not fair”; I was taught to remember that there is always someone who is worse off than you. But, going through this experience for the second time, all hope receded. I felt like a shell of myself. So much so that I now have a hard time remembering those dark days in much detail. My mind has blocked them out. But I do remember being convinced that I wasn’t going to live. And, what’s more, I was sure that the news of my illness would get out. And it did—for a fleeting moment. Six weeks after the surgery, the National Enquirer ran a short story. A reporter asked me about it and I denied it.

Ultimately Clarke decided to move forward with her story because so many other people have suffered from the same issues, many who haven’t had the same access to care that she has. At the end of her essay she reveals she’s launched a charity in conjunction with partners in the U.K. and the U.S called SameYou, which aims to provide treatment for people recovering from brain injuries and stroke.

“There is something gratifying, and beyond lucky, about coming to the end of “Thrones,” Clarke writes. “I’m so happy to be here to see the end of this story and the beginning of whatever comes next.”

It’s amazing she was able to keep this from getting out before now. What a powerful story. Sounds like she could write an incredible book or star in a movie about her own life experience.

You can listen to her talk about her experience below:

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