"Game of Thrones" actress Emilia Clarke is amazed by her recovery journey since suffering two life-threatening brain aneurysms during her time on the HBO drama.
"As soon as any part of your brain doesn't get blood for a second, it's gone. And so the blood finds a different route to get around, but then whatever bit it's missing is therefore gone." Clarke first opened up about her health in a New Yorker op-ed published in March 2019.
The "Game of Thrones" actress revealed she suffered her first brain aneurysm in 2011 at 24 years old.
"The pain - shooting, stabbing, constricting pain - was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged," she wrote, adding that she started to recall "Game of Thrones" lines to keep her brain sharp.
After an MRI of her brain, she was diagnosed with a "Subarachnoid haemorrhage, a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain. 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," Clarke said.
At the hospital, she underwent "Minimally invasive" brain surgery.
In 2013, Clarke once again had surgery after "Growth on the other side of my brain had doubled in size."
