Emilia Clarke has been living in recovery mode for the last ten or so years.
It started in 2011. Clarke’s head began to hurt while she was only in her early 20s. After being admitted to the hospital, she was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a kind of stroke that kills one in three patients. Soon the discomfort became intolerable.
Theoretically, her ascent to celebrity had only begun. When Clarke’s brain practically “killed” on her, she had just finished shooting the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, in which she played Daenerys Targaryen.
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“I managed to get to the dressing room somehow, virtually crawling. When I got to the bathroom, I fell to my knees and started to feel very, violently nauseous. The agony, which was shooting, stabbing, and restricting, became worse in the meanwhile. A personal article she authored for the New Yorker in 2019 said, “At some level, I recognized what was happening: my brain was injured.
She explained to BBC One’s Sunday Morning that she kept “asking myself all these questions” and “hilariously kept saying lines from the show [Game of Thrones] in my head, because I knew… that if you’re throwing up and you have a headache, that it’s not good for your brain.” At the time, she was determined not to lose her memory.
The actor’s ability to return home and work on Game of Thrones provided her a “meaning.”
In 2013, two years after her initial aneurysm, the actress would have another setback on her road to recovery.
She recounted the specifics of her tragedy earlier this week, 11 years after her life-threatening adventure started.
“Any area of your brain that goes without blood for even a little period of time perishes. And so the blood takes an alternative path to avoid the problem, but whatever it was missing is now lost, she told CBS.
“Considering how much of my brain is no longer functional, it’s amazing that I can talk, sometimes with some intelligence, and lead a fully normal life without experiencing any negative effects. I belong to the very, extremely, extremely tiny minority of individuals who can endure it.
Following both aneurysms, “quite a chunk” of her brain, according to Clarke, is gone. The actress said in an interview with CBS that it was unclear which portions of her had effectively “died” with her brain.
She said that they were physically examining her head and saying things like, “Well, we believe it may be her focus, it could be her peripheral vision.”
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The actress, who is presently acting in a stage version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, admits she has somewhat changed her career focus to work in theater since memory is a crucial component of her trade.
Despite the difficulties, the performer claims she no longer gives her missing brain areas a second thought.
It’s the brain you have, so there’s no need trying to think of anything that could be missing; what you have is amazing, so let’s utilize that, she added.
In order to aid others recuperating from brain traumas, Clarke established her own nonprofit organization called SameYou in 2019.