Emilia Clarke Is 'Missing' Parts of Her Brain After Two Aneurysms
Celebrity

Emilia Clarke Is 'Missing' Parts of Her Brain After Two Aneurysms

Emilia Clarke is getting real about recovering from her life-threatening health scare.

Back in 2019, the Game of Thronesstar revealed in an essay for The New Yorker that she'd suffered from two brain aneurysms, once in 2011 and a second time in 2013. And while Clarke may have made a relatively successful recovery, she's still had to deal with some long-term effects from the strokes, brain operation and subsequent aphasia diagnosis, including "missing" parts of her brain.

Over the weekend, the actress appeared on BBC One's Sunday Morningprogram to talk about how lucky she was to be in her "remarkable" position, as she is still "able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions."

“I am in the really, really, really small minority of people that can survive that," as Clarke said.

After all, Clarke explained that strokes are dangerous because "as soon as any part of your brain doesn't get blood for a second it's gone," before adding that the blood has to find "a different route to get around."

"But then whatever bit is missing is therefore gone," she continued. Despite all this though, Clarke said she remembered thinking that "'this is who you are'" and that "'this is the brain that you have,' so there’s no point in continually wracking your brains about what might not be there."

Clarke's first aneurysm happened when she was at the gym and began experience a "shooting, stabbing, constricting pain" that just kept "getting worse." At the hospital, she was then diagnosed with a subarachnoid hemorrhage — which kills around a third of patients immediately or soon after onset — and underwent a "minimally invasive" brain surgery. Unfortunately though, she would have to get another surgery in 2013 once a "growth on the other side of my brain had doubled in size."

Check out Clarke's entire interview with BBC One's Sunday Morning showhere.

Photo via Getty / Jeff Spicer