Emilia Clarke survived two brain surgeries
"Game of Thrones" actress Emila Clarke revealed in a personal essay posted on The New Yorker website that she suffered two life-threatening brain hemorrhages since early 2011, the same year the HBO series premiered. and catapulted her to success in the role of Daenerys Targaryen.
"Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I almost lost my mind and then my life," the three-time Emmy nominee wrote. "I have never told this story publicly, but now is the time ..."
Coinciding with the post, Clarke announced her new charity, SameYou, which will advocate for improving neurological recovery care for young adults who suffer brain injuries or strokes and then face a long and costly fight to reclaim their lives. Advances in acute care have pushed the brain injury survival rate to new levels and expanded the victim population, a population of 50 million people worldwide that has quietly included Clarke in its ranks. number since February 2011.
In the New Yorker essay, "A Battle for My Life," Clarke explained the harrowing experience of discovering that something was terribly wrong inside her head. The London-born actress experienced "shooting and squeezing pain" in her skull during training with her personal coach.
"Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room," she wrote Clarke. “I got to the bathroom, got down on my knees and got violent. Meanwhile, the pain was getting worse. On some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged. For a few moments, I tried to push away the pain and nausea. I said to myself, "They won't paralyze me." I wiggled my fingers and toes to make sure that was true. To keep my memory alive, I tried to remember, among other things, some lines from Game of Thrones. "
At a nearby hospital, the results were disturbing: an aneurysm requiring urgent brain surgery. A procedure that saved her life, but then, in a critical two-week period in postoperative recovery, a nurse asked the actress to say her name as part of a series of cognitive exercises. Clarke couldn't do it.
"My full name is Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke. But I couldn't remember it," she wrote Clarke in the essay. "Instead, the nonsensical words came out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic ... I'm an actress; I need to remember my lines. Now I can't remember my name."
Clarke developed a condition called aphasia. She spent a month and she returned to work on Thrones, but the actress was accompanied by fear in every scene. That's because a second, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain had been detected. It was a threat that she could "explode" at any moment. By 2013, she had doubled in size so she had a second surgery, which was successful.
Medical illnesses did not prevent Clarke's career success. Her character has turned the spotlight on "Game of Thrones," which is set to begin the eighth and final season of her historic HBO run. In 2013, Clarke also made her Broadway debut in “Breakfast at Tiffany's” as Holly Golightly. In 2015, “Terminator Genisys” added Sarah Connor to the list of formidable women she has played. In 2018, the matriarch House Targaryen briefly joined the Jedi universe when Clarke portrayed Qi'ra in Ron Howard's "Solo: A Star Wars Story" (2018).
It turns out that professional triumphs hid the personal agonies she endured. "The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery," Clarke wrote of her ordeal in 2013. "It seemed like she had been through a more gruesome war than anyone Daenerys has ever experienced."
