Emilia Clarke Admits To 2 Near-Death Brain Aneurysms

“Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time,” the actress admitted in a personal essay for The New Yorker.

While coping with the stress of being a new actress in Hollywood, Emilia turned to a trainer, where her first episode took place. “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,” she wrote.

While in plank position, she “immediately felt as though an elastic band were squeezing my brain.” “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. Meanwhile, the pain — shooting, stabbing, constricting pain — was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged,” she wrote.

Upon arrival to the hospital and an MRI, Emilia received her diagnosis. “I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture. 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,” she wrote. “When I woke, the pain was unbearable. I had no idea where I was. My field of vision was constricted. There was a tube down my throat and I was parched and nauseated,” Emilia wrote. “They moved me out of the I.C.U. after four days and told me that the great hurdle was to make it to the two-week mark. If I made it that long with minimal complications, my chances of a good recovery were high.”

She went back for a routine check up in 2013, where she was told the growth on the other side of her brain had doubled in size. After an emergency surgery, the operation failed.

After some time, she fully recovered, but she’s yet to admit this health news until now. “Everyone was so scared for her,” a source told ENQUIRER after her 2013 aneurysm. “She’s so young, and nobody would have ever expected that she could be suffering from something so serious.”

At the time, many were worried about her role of Daenerys Targaryen on the hit series. “Nobody wanted to imagine what would happen if she weren’t able to return to the show,” the insider said. “The worst part is that all of the books (that the show is based on) aren’t even written yet, so it would have thrown (author) George R.R. Martin a nasty curve as well.” The source noted at the time, “Emilia is doing really well now and she should be OK moving forward. No one really knows what caused the aneurysm. It seems like a fluke thing.”