In 2011, Emilia Clarke’s life changed.
She had what would end up being the first of two brain aneurysms. The paramedics who rushed her to the hospital her first were so amazing that their kindness has stayed with her, even eight years later.
She was cast in “Game of Thrones” in the midst of her warning signs.
In an essay for The New Yorker , Emilia revealed back in March that she suffered two brain aneurysms while on Game of Thrones .
She experienced fainting spells, headaches, and dizziness her whole life.
She wrapped shooting season 1 with no idea how iconic she’d become.
But what she did know was how hard interviews already were.
“I always got the same question: some variation of ‘You play such a strong woman, and yet you take off your clothes. Why?’ In my head, I’d respond, ‘How many men do I need to kill to prove myself?'”
She decided to take up with a personal trainer.
“To relieve the stress, I worked out with a trainer. I was a television actor now, after all, and that is what television actors do. We work out.”
She was at the gym on that fateful day.
On February 11, 2011, she was in the locker room of the gym when an intense headache hit her. Then came exhaustion and weakness.
She tried to go through the exercises, but she couldn’t handle it.
She left her workout and tried to get to the locker room.
“I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t. I told my trainer I had to take a break. Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room,” she wrote.
She was sick to her stomach.
She was “violently ill,” in the locker room bathroom.
In her head, the pain was so bad that it felt like her brain was being constricted.
“At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
Another woman found her.
She figured out that something wasn’t right with Emilia, and laid her down on her side in the recovery position.
“Then everything became, at once, noisy and blurry,” she wrote.
The paramedics made her feel normal.
Recently, she opened up to People for their first Kindness Issue about how grateful she was to the paramedics who found her.
“The paramedics were unbelievable,” she told them in her interview.
She thanked them in an interview.
“They’d given me drugs so I was in less pain, wrapped me up like a tortilla and made me laugh the whole way to the hospital.”
While they were on the way, the paramedics called her parents for her.
They made things way less scary.
Even though she was terrified and things were dire, they kept her conscious and happy.
“There I was, bleeding in the brain, and there we were in this ambulance having an absolute giggle. They were so gracious.”
Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be her only aneurysm.
In her New Yorker essay, Emilia revealed that a second aneurysm was still in her brain.
“The doctors said, though, that it was small and it was possible it would remain dormant and harmless indefinitely.”
After shooting season 2, she went for a brain scan.
“The growth on the other side of my brain had doubled in size, and the doctor said we should ‘take care of it.'”
She was going to undergo a minimally invasive surgery.
The surgery failed.
“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. 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.”
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The second surgery was successful!
That second surgery had to be done through her skull.
It was brutal, but she made it out. And even though she was worried, she didn’t suffer any long-term side effects.
Well, except for one…
“Now I tell people that what it robbed me of is good taste in men.”
Emilia now runs a charity.
On top of acting, she’s dedicated to her charity, SameYou. It aims to help people worldwide with neurorehabilitation after any kind of brain trauma.
Forget the Mother of Dragons. She’s the queen of kindness.
