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Emilia Clarke

Emilia Clarke on two brain aneurysms, and the week she could not say her own name

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

In March 2019 Emilia Clarke wrote a first-person essay for The New Yorker about two brain aneurysms she had survived. She said she had never told the story publicly before. The first was on the morning of 11 February 2011, a few weeks after she finished filming the first series of Game of Thrones. She was working out at a gym in north London, already fighting a headache and a heavy tiredness, and while holding a plank she felt something she described as an elastic band tightening around her brain. She made it to the toilets and was violently sick. A woman in the next cubicle helped her into the recovery position and an ambulance was called. At the Whittington Hospital nobody yet knew what was wrong, so she could not be given anything for the pain. A scan found a subarachnoid haemorrhage — bleeding into the space around the brain, caused by a ruptured aneurysm. She was moved to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in central London and had three hours of surgery to seal the aneurysm off, reached by a wire threaded up from an artery in the groin rather than by opening her skull. She was twenty-four. She was past the two-week mark when a nurse asked her name as part of a set of cognitive checks and she could not produce it. What came out was nonsense. She had aphasia, caused by the damage to her brain, and for someone whose whole working life was language it was the thing she feared most. It lasted about a week. She was in hospital for a month. While she was still there she was told there was a second, smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain. It might stay quiet indefinitely, so it would be watched. She went back to work. She described filming the second series exhausted and unsure of herself, taking morphine between publicity interviews, and being convinced for a long stretch that she was going to die. In 2013, after the third series and while she was performing on Broadway, one of her regular scans showed the second growth had doubled in size. The operation she was told would be simpler went wrong. She woke screaming; there had been a large bleed, and surgeons had to go back in at once, this time through her skull. Parts of it were replaced with titanium. She came out with a drain in her head and a scar running from her scalp to her ear. That recovery was harder than the first — a month in hospital, anxiety and panic attacks, and weeks she says her mind has since blocked out. She wrote that she has healed far beyond what she expected, and that she helped set up SameYou, a charity working on recovery from brain injury and stroke. She was also careful to say she knew how lucky she had been, both to live and in the care she was given. Nothing here is medical advice. The NHS says a headache that is extremely painful and does not go away, weakness on one side, slurred speech or loss of sight are reasons to call 999.

• Brain aneurysm