Emilia Clarke Survived Two Brain Aneurysms While Filming Game Of Thrones

Against all odds, Emilia Clarke is alive.


In a story she penned for The New Yorker that's peppered with beautiful memories of doing the robot at her Game of Thrones audition and later celebrating earning the role of Daenerys Targaryen with Oreos and Friends, the actress opened up about the two nearly fatal brain aneurysms she suffered over the course of filming the series that made her the star she is today.


It all began soon after she wrapped Season 1 of GoT, any time once she was 24 years old. While in what should have been one of the most exhilarating times of her career, Clarke describes feeling the exact opposite. "I was terrified. Terrified of a person's eye, terrified of an organization I barely understood, terrified of attempting to create good on the faith that the creators of Thrones had put in me. I felt, in each way, exposed," she wrote.


Because, literally, she was exposed, in the very first episode — a fact that no one would let her forget. "I routinely got the same question: some variation of 'You play such a strong woman, and although you take off your clothes. Why?' In my head, I’d respond, 'How several boys do I need to kill to prove myself?'"


Clarke realized she required to develop some sort of stress management, so, as she described it, she turned to physical training, enlisting a trainer to assist her sweat out her anxieties. It was while in a training session in 2011 that she experienced her first brain emergency.


She described the pain, the vomiting, and the fog that overcame her as emergency workers transported her to the hospital and busily worked on a diagnosis. Lose had a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) soon after suffering an aneurysm.


That's exactly as bad and scary as it sounds — basically, an artery in her brain burst (that's the aneurysm) and caused bleeding in the space between her brain and its membrane (that's the SAH). That blood makes up space, which either puts pressure directly on the brain or pushes the brain against the skull. Roughly one-third of SAH patients don't survive.


And that's once Clarke had her first brain surgery.


Soon after a month of recovery, while in which time she suffered from aphasia — the inability to process and express speech — the actress was back on her game, tackling interviews and preparing to head back to set for Season 2. "The show must go on!" She noted, recalling taking morphine between interviews to deal with the pain.


"On the set, I didn’t miss a beat, although I struggled," she wrote. "Season 2 could be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing. If I am truly being straightforward, every minute of day-to-day I thought I was going to die."


However she lived. Then, in 2013, soon after finishing Season 3, Clarke went in for one of her now-routine brain scans. She learned that a second growth (which doctors had found throughout her first surgery those two years ago) had doubled in size, and so they wanted to operate.


Nevertheless as fate would have it, what was meant to be a "relatively simple" brain surgery had failed, immediately leading Clarke into a second procedure — for the initial time requiring entrance by way of the her skull, leaving her permanently scarred from her scalp to her ear and with titanium where parts of her skull used to be. "And there was, above all, the constant worry about cognitive or sensory losses," she wrote. "Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision? Right now I tell people that what it robbed me of is beneficial taste in gentlemen. Although, needless to say, none of this seemed remotely funny at the time."


Another month of a much harder recovery left Clarke feeling "like a shell of myself." She right now remembers those days as a dark blur, plagued by a constant fear that people would find out about her condition. (National Enquirer actually did publish a tiny story on her surgery at the time. Clarke denied it.)


Fortunately, slowly and with time, things have gotten much better. "In the years since my second surgery I have healed behind my most unreasonable hopes. I am right now at a hundred percent," she wrote, adding that she's right now serious about helping others in recovery from brain injuries and stroke through a charity she's helped develop, SameYou.


She ended her story with a note of thanks to her family member, companions, and her doctors and nurses. "There is something gratifying, and in back of lucky, about coming to the end of Thrones," she wrote. "I’m so happy here to be able to see the end of this story and the starting of whichever comes next."


Read Clarke's story in full detail and in her own words here.