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emilia clarke laughs about missing part of her brain after aneurysms

"i asked the medical staff to let me die. my job — my entire dream of what my life would be — centred on language, on communication. without that, i was lost."

emilia clarke: there's 'quite a bit missing' of brain after aneurysms
after her first aneurysm, emilia clarke had aphasia, a brain condition that affects the part of the brain that controls language and speech. (photo by chris delmas / afp)chris delmas/afp/getty images

“game of thrones” actress emilia clarke is opening up about what her life looks like since she suffered two aneurysms in her 20s.

“the amount of my brain that is no longer usable — it’s remarkable that i am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions,” clarke, now 35, told bbc news’s sunday morning in a video interview.

“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,” she explained. in her case, “there’s quite a bit missing,” she said. “i am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that.”

emilia clarke learned of aneurysms between seasons of game of thrones

in 2011, just after she finished filming the first season of the hit hbo series game of thrones , clarke was working out with a trainer when she started to experience what felt like “an elastic band … squeezing my brain,” she wrote in a 2019 essay for the new yorker. “at some level, i knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.” she was rushed to the hospital, where an mri determined that she had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a stroke caused by bleeding in the space around the brain. this usually happens when an aneurysm — a weakened part of a blood vessel — bursts and leaks, johns hopkins medicine explains . the high volume of blood puts pressure on the brain, which can damage its cells.

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clarke had emergency brain surgery to seal off the aneurysm. “when i woke, the pain was unbearable. i had no idea where i was. my field of vision was constricted,” she wrote. she couldn’t remember her name, and was horrified when she started speaking nonsense words she didn’t understand. it turned out clarke had aphasia, a brain condition that affects the part of the brain that controls language and speech. it can make speaking, writing, and sometimes understanding language very difficult. it is also an extremely frustrating condition both for the people who have it and the people around them: aphasia patients will sometimes know what they want to say, but they can’t express it. (it’s the same condition bruce willis’s family announced he had earlier this year.)

“in my worst moments, i wanted to pull the plug,” clarke wrote. “i asked the medical staff to let me die. my job — my entire dream of what my life would be — centred on language, on communication. without that, i was lost.”

clarke required surgery to treat the second aneurysm

clarke was lucky: her aphasia passed after about a week, and she could speak and remember once again. but her doctors told her that she had another smaller aneurysm on the other side of her brain. they believed it would stay dormant, but as she started filming the second season of game of thrones, clarke said she had a lot of trouble. she felt woozy, exhausted and often in pain.

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“every minute of every day i thought i was going to die,” she said.
in 2013, two years after her first aneurysm and after finishing the show’s third season, clarke’s routine brain scan showed that the aneurysm had doubled in size. her doctors tried to surgically remove it in a non-invasive procedure, but when that didn’t work, they had to cut into her brain.
“i emerged from the operation with a drain coming out of my head,” she wrote. “bits of my skull had been replaced by titanium.” the recovery was long and painful, and “at certain points, i lost all hope.”

eventually, though, she did recover — and her health is now better than anyone expected. “in the years since my second surgery i have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes. i am now at a hundred per cent,” clarke wrote in 2019. she has since started a charity called sameyou for people recovering from brain injury.

she tries to have perspective about her situation, and she understands how lucky she is, she said. she told bbc news she sometimes laughs about the fact that some of her brain is missing.
“i thought, ‘well, this is who you are. this is the brain that you have,’” she said. “so there’s no point in continually wracking your brains about what might not be there.”

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maija kappler is a reporter and editor at healthing. she can be reached at mkappler@postmedia.com
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