Emilia Clarke thought she was “meant to die” after her second brain haemorrhage.
The 39-year-old actress said she felt as though she had “cheated death” after suffering the two medical emergencies while starring as Daenerys Targaryen on TV show Game of Thrones.
Speaking on the podcast How To Fail with Elizabeth Day, she said: “I was just convinced that I had cheated death, and I was meant to die.
“Every day, that’s all I could think about.”
Emilia had her first haemorrhage after wrapping on Game of Thrones’ first season, and said she knew something was seriously wrong when she collapsed in the gym during a workout session.
She added: “The closest thing to describe it is imagining an elastic band just snapping around your brain. This insane pressure.”
After collapsing, Emilia managed to crawl into the toilets and started vomiting due to the pain.
At that moment, she said she “knew I was being brain damaged”.
Emilia’s next thought was about how she would be able to continue on Game of Thrones, which ran from 2011 to 2019.
She admitted: “I was so ashamed that this thing had happened and that the people who had employed me might see me as weak or see me as something that could be broken.”
The actress told podcast host Elizabeth that she told Game of Thrones’ showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff about her medical emergency but didn’t tell anyone else.
She said: “I just didn’t want anyone to know.”
The second brain aneurysm came when Emilia was living in New York while performing in a play on Broadway, after doctors spotted it during a scan following the first haemorrhage.
She had an operation, but doctors were forced to do emergency surgery when the first one went wrong.
She added: “My parents were waiting for me, and the doctors would come down every half an hour and say, ‘We think she’s going to die’.”
It was after the second haemorrhage that Emilia said she “shut down emotionally”.
She explained: “When you have a brain injury, you move around in the world differently. You become very sensitive.”
Emilia previously said she’s in a “very good spot” now because she gets her “brain scanned every year”.
The actress added: “I’m in like 0.001 per cent of people who survive what I’ve had without any real repercussions.”
Read the full article here
