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.
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Emilia starts off by explaining what it was like to shoot the first season of “Game of Thrones”.
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.
“Somehow, almost crawling, I made it to the locker room. I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill,” she wrote.
“Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
Emilia described the experience, and her attempts to “will the pain away.”
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.'”
A foggy chaos ensued once someone found her on the floor of the bathroom.
“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.
After an MRI, doctors determined the cause of her severe headache.
“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.
She needed brain surgery, and at the time, had no idea that it would not be her last — or her worst operation.
After about two weeks post-surgery, a nurse came in and asked Emilia her name.
“I couldn’t remember it. Instead, nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic.”
“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.
She recalls moments in her past that might’ve been connected to her first aneurysm.
“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.”
But back to present day, she revealed that she was suffering from a condition called aphasia.
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.”
Fortunately, the aphasia passed in about a week, and she was able to speak again.
However, she was told that she had a second, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain that could “pop” at any time.
“Recovery was hardly instant. There was still the pain to deal with, and morphine to keep it at bay,” she wrote.
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!”
Before filming the second season of “Game of Thrones”, she admitted that she felt “deeply unsure” of herself.
“I was often so woozy, so weak, that I thought I was going to die,” she wrote.
“I sipped on morphine in between interviews,” she wrote.
“The pain was there, and the fatigue was like the worst exhaustion I’d ever experienced, multiplied by a million,” she added.
“Season 2 would be my worst. I didn’t know what Daenerys was doing,” she wrote.
She added, “If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.”
After a routine brain scan, she learned that her second aneurysm had doubled in size, and required surgery to remove it.
“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.”
“When they woke me, I was screaming in pain. The procedure had failed.”
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.
Emilia explained that the second surgery’s recovery was significantly more difficult than the first.
“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.
She said her initial worries revolved around potential losses in “cognitive or sensory” abilities.
“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.”
She was also worried that the news of her health would make headlines, but when a reporter asked about it, she simply denied it.
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.
