By Gina Vivinetto -
NBC News
Actress Emilia Clarke said she is grateful that the two brain aneurysms she suffered in her early 20s have not robbed her of her ability to live a normal life.
The star of the TV series
Game of Thrones
, 35, explained in an interview on the British public broadcaster's
Sunday Morning
program that she feels lucky to be able to speak despite having suffered two strokes while acting in the HBO series. , which won multiple Emmy Awards.
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"A good part of my brain is no longer useful: it is remarkable that I can speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions," Clarke said, according to an excerpt from the interview published by the Metro newspaper. .
“I am in the very, very, very small minority of people who can survive that,” he
added.
Actress Emilia Clarke on February 2, 2020 in London, England.Samir Hussein / Samir Hussein/WireImage
Clarke said a study of the back of his brain showed "a lot of it was missing," adding: "He always makes me laugh."
“Heart attacks, basically, [what happens is that] as soon as a part of your brain stops receiving blood for a second, it disappears.
So the blood finds another faster route and moves to another part, but then the part that is left without blood disappears.”
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An aneurysm is a clot in the wall of an artery that grows and can burst, causing life-threatening bleeding, according to the National Institutes of Health.
They affect 3% to 5% of the country's population, according to the American Heart Association.
What Clarke experienced is known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which occurs when a brain aneurysm ruptures.
Clarke described the terrible health problem she had in a 2019 essay for The New Yorker magazine.
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The actress said that she suffered the first aneurysm in February 2011, after the end of the first season of
Game of Thrones
.
Clarke, then 24, was exercising with her trainer when she experienced a painful sensation in her brain.
“My coach had me get into a plank position and I immediately felt like my brain was racked by a rubber band,” she wrote, “somehow, almost on all fours, I made it to the locker room.
I got to the bathroom, fell to my knees and felt violent and sick.
Meanwhile, the pain (stabbing, sharp, constricting) was getting worse.
Somehow she knew what was going on: my brain was damaged.”
At the hospital, he was diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage and underwent a three-hour emergency surgery.
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After the procedure, he experienced excruciating pain, vision problems and aphasia, a condition in which damage to the brain affects a person's ability to speak and write.
Clarke remembers that he even forgot his own name.
“In my worst moments, I wanted to disconnect. I asked the medical staff to let me die,"
she said.
He was still recovering in hospital when he was told a month after the operation that another, smaller aneurysm had been found on the opposite side of his brain.
Doctors explained that the clot could remain small and harmless for the rest of her life.
And they advised him to be very vigilant.
In 2013, when Clarke was performing in a play on Broadway, a CT scan revealed that the aneurysm had doubled in size.
She underwent treatment but had complications.
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“When they woke me up, I was screaming in pain
,” Clarke said, “the procedure had failed.
I had a massive hemorrhage and the doctors made it clear to me that my chances of survival were slim if I didn't have another operation.
This time they needed to get to my brain the old-fashioned way, through my skull."
Recovery from her second surgery was even more difficult than the first.
“I came out of the operation with a tube in my head.
Pieces of my skull had been replaced with titanium,” wrote the star, who also recalled experiencing panic and anxiety attacks in hospital.
In the end,
he managed to recover and now lives a normal life.
"In the years since my second surgery, I have healed more than I could have imagined," he said, "I am 100%."
