We all know Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, but we had no idea about the health struggles that she's been dealing with in her personal life.
In a detailed essay that appears in The New Yorker, she gives fans a glimpse of what she's been going through for the very first time.
She was nervous, and of course, under a lot of pressure. To relieve the stress, she worked out with a trainer.
On one particular day at the gym, she revealed that she felt a bad headache coming on, and barely crawled to the bathroom before she was violently ill.
"Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."
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 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 parent," she wrote.
"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," she wrote.
She added that a third of SAH patients die immediately, or soon after.
After about two weeks post-surgery, a nurse came in and asked Emilia her name.
"I’d never experienced fear like that—a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name," she wrote. She was only 24 years old at the time.
"Sometimes I got a little light-headed, because I often had low blood pressure and a low heart rate. Once in a while, I’d get dizzy and pass out...in drama school I’d collapse once in a while.
But it all seemed manageable, part of the stress of being an actor and of life in general. Now I think that I might have been experiencing warning signs of what was to come."
She wrote about feeling like she didn't want to live anymore.
"I knew I was faltering. In my worst moments, I wanted to pull the plug. I asked the medical staff to let me die. My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, on communication. Without that, I was lost."
However, she was told that she had a second, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain that could "pop" at any time.
Emilia described her attitude towards her illness as an attempt to lessen the burden on others, "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!"
"I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die," she wrote.
"The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million," she added.
She added, "If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die."
"I was promised a relatively simple operation, easier than last time. I went for surgery, another trip up the femoral artery to my brain. No problem," she wrote. "Except there was."
She'd had a significant amount of internal bleeding and it was imperative that the doctors perform another operation "the old- fashioned way", through her skull.
As a result, Emilia has parts of her skill replaced by titanium, and a scar that curves from her scalp to her ear.
"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," she wrote.
"Would it be concentration? Memory? Peripheral vision?" she asked. "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."
Now, she's choosing to tell the world in her own words.
Today, she says that she's at "at a hundred percent," and is happy to be able to see Game of Thrones come to an end.
"There is something gratifying, and beyond lucky, about coming to the end of “Thrones.” I’m so happy to be here to see the end of this story and the beginning of whatever comes next," she finished.
