In a telling account for leading international website The New Yorker, Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke revealed that she suffered from two brain aneurysms in 2011 and 2013 while she was involved with the series. She suffered the first aneurysm while working out at the gym in North London – this was after she completed filming the first season of Game Of Thrones in 2011.
"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,” Emilia wrote in her account for The New Yorker.
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Emilia Clarke in Game Of Thrones[/caption]
She felt severely ill after her workout session and made her way to the locker room, where she felt "violently, voluminously ill” and was hospitalized soon after. She was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage – described as a “life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain” in the report.
Emilia was told that she needed a "minimally invasive" surgery that required doctors to cut open her skull. She was in the hospital for a month after her surgery and suffered from “vision issues, unbearable pain and memory loss” and in fact, couldn’t recall her name at times.
Emilia was in pain even after the surgery as she wrote, “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.” But that wasn’t the end for Emilia as she suffered the second aneurysm in 2013 after the third season of Game Of Thrones. While she was in New York for a play, Emilia was asked to visit the doctor for a brain scan. The reports, Emilia said, confirmed that a “growth on the side of her brain had doubled in size” and she required another surgery for it.
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"This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way — through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately. I emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head. Bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium," Emilia wrote in her account.
Emilia Clarke plays Daenerys Targaryen in Game Of Thrones.
