Emilia Clarke Opens Up About Surviving Two Brain Aneurysms

"Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time," said Emilia Clark who suffered from two brain aneurysms that nearly took her life in the early years of the blockbuster HBO series. 

She had previously opened up opened about the surgeries she went under in 2011 and 2013. For the unaware, a brain aneurysm is a bulge in a blood vessel in your brain, and if it bursts it can cause fatal internal bleeding. Fortunately, the actress survived to narrate her journey.

The actress retouched the topic of her life-threatening surgeries in an interview with BBC’s Sunday Morning in which she promoted her production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The play marks the actress’ West End debut.

“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,” Clarke stated. “I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.” Clarke then recalled the time she saw scans of her brain after the incidents. “There’s quite a bit missing,” Clarke said before erupting into a big chuckle. “Which always makes me laugh… Strokes, basically, as soon as any part of your brain doesn’t get blood for a second, it’s gone. So the blood finds a different route to get around, but then whatever bit is missing is therefore gone.”

Clark previously expressed that “It was the most excruciating pain,” she suffered as a result of the aneurysms, which caused repeated vomiting and left her trying to stay conscious and maintain her brain function.

In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the Daenerys Targaryen actor said: "The first time it was difficult, with the second one I found it much harder to stay optimistic. [I coped with it as a] a day-to-day thing. I definitely went through a period of being... down - putting it mildly. The second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died. If a part of your brain doesn't get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It's like you short circuit. So, I had that."

She went on to describe how her leading role in GoT may just have saved her life, adding: "You go on the set and you play a badass character, and you walk through fire, and you speak to hundreds of people, and you're being asked to be - to work as hard as you possibly can.
"And that became the thing that just saved me from considering my own mortality."

In 2019, the actress spoke to The New Yorker and also shared unseen pictures from her phase of treatment and recovery. The actress exclaimed "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. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately."

In a newspaper interview, she said, "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. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately."

Following her ordeal, Emilia launched a charity, SameYou, which aims to raise money for those recovering from brain surgeries and strokes.