Alan Jackson, final gig, retires amid battle with CMT illness

Emilia Clarke’s brain aneurysm

Emilie Clarke filmed battle scenes for Game of Thrones, but in 2019 she published an essay in The New Yorker entitled “A Battle for My Life”.

Having had a severe headache at the gym, “I got to the bathroom, fell to my knees and began to throb violently and bulging,” the actress wrote. “Meanwhile, the pain – stabbing, stabbing, constricting – was getting worse. On some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged.

She was taken to hospital for a brain scan.

“The diagnosis was quick and disturbing: subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a potentially fatal type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain,” the Emmy nominee added. “I had an aneurysm, a ruptured artery.”

Emilia immediately underwent surgery to seal the aneurysm, describing the pain as “unbearable.” While she was recovering, she continued, she suffered from aphasia and “mumbled nonsense.”

A week later, “the aphasia passed,” Emilia added, and she left the hospital a month after her admission.

During a brain scan in 2013, she discovered a growth “doubled in size” and that she needed surgery again.

“When they woke me up, I was screaming in pain,” she wrote. “The procedure failed. I had a massive hemorrhage and the doctors made it clear that my chances of survival were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they had to access my brain the old fashioned way, through my skull.”

Luckily, Emilia shared, she’s now “one hundred percent.”