In 2011, everything was supposed to be great for actress Emilia Clarke. She was one of the stars of HBO’s major new series “Game of Thrones,” and would, overnight, be a known name and instant celebrity. Of course, as it would most anyone else, that prospect terrified the young actress, which caused her a great deal of stress. But little did she know that 2011 would be the beginning of a health crisis she never expected.
“To relieve the stress, I worked out with a trainer,” Clarke explains in a new essay she penned at The New Yorker. “I was a television actor now, after all, and that is what television actors do. We work out. On the morning of February 11, 2011, I was getting dressed in the locker room of a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I started to feel a bad headache coming on. 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.”
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But something was wrong. After doing a series of exercises, Clarke had to stop and run to the locker room.
She continues, “I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill. Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.”
After making noise in the restroom, a woman heard Clarke’s struggles and offered help.
“She came to help me and maneuvered me onto my side, in the recovery position,” Clarke writes. “Then everything became, at once, noisy and blurry. 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 parents, who live in Oxfordshire, and they were told to meet me at the emergency room of Whittington Hospital.”
The actress found out that she suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). And later, she would discover that she was one of the lucky ones, writing, “As I later learned, about a third of SAH patients die immediately or soon thereafter. For the patients who do survive, urgent treatment is required to seal off the aneurysm, as there is a very high risk of a second, often fatal bleed. If I was to live and avoid terrible deficits, I would have to have urgent surgery. And, even then, there were no guarantees.”
Of course, the 3-hour surgery went well for the then-24-year-old actress. But she had no idea that this was just the beginning of what would be more surgeries and another life-threatening incident.
Clarke explains that after her first SAH surgery, she experience aphasia, where her ability to speak was greatly altered and she was prone to just producing gibberish instead of words when she expected to communicate. This led to a dark moment in the hospital where she says, “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.”
The aphasia passed and despite a couple of years of wooziness and fatigue, no major health issues arose. That changed in 2013, after the production of Season 3 of ‘Thrones’ ended. Doctors found a mass in her brain that required surgery. Unfortunately, the surgery didn’t go as planned.
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Clarke writes, “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. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull. And the operation had to happen immediately.”
The surgery went as well as it could, but the recovery was still an issue, as you might expect. Nevertheless, Clarke persevered and says she’s now doing great, even after two instances of near-death.
She says, “In the years since my second surgery, I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. I am now at a hundred percent.”
And as a way to give back, Clarke started a new charity, called SameYou, which she is now promoting, using her celebrity status as one of the biggest names in Hollywood to shed light on the medical issues that plagued her and others like her.
For those wanting to see the actress in action, the final season of “Game of Thrones” begins on HBO on April 14.
