The famous actress has just had an unprecedented share of the aneurysm disease – which twice threatened her life in the midst of filming the blockbuster “Game of Thrones “ .
“Right at the moment when all my childhood dreams were coming true, I almost lost consciousness, and then my life. I’ve never told this story before, but now is the time . ” That was the opening for the confided lines that Emilia Clarke – the actress who played the dragon queen Daenerys in the TV masterpiece ” Game of Thrones” wrote to The New Yorker magazine.
Beautiful Online would like to quote part of the letter below:
It was early 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of ‘ Game of Thrones’.– new epic series based on fantasy books by writer George RR Martin. I had almost no professional acting experience, but they still gave me a huge role: Daenerys Stormborn of the Targaryens, aka Khaleesi of the Dothraki Sea of Grass, the princess of Dragonstone, who breaks the chains , who cannot be burned, and the Mother of Dragons. Despite being young, Daenerys was sold as the bride of a barbarian general named Drogo. The story continued after that was very long, up to 8 seasons, but in a nutshell, she became a lot stronger, a lot more mature. She became an icon of feminism and self-esteem. Before I knew it, there were thousands of little girls everywhere wearing platinum wigs and dainty Daenerys outfits for Halloween.
The film’s two screenwriters, David Benioff and DB Weiss, told me that the character was a combination of Napoleon, General Joan Arc, and Lawrence of Arabia. However, just a few weeks after filming the first season, I no longer felt invincible like those characters, but fear. I was afraid of all the attention, afraid of the huge film industry that I had just groped into, afraid of disappointing the loyal readers of the book series. I felt, above all other sensations, a nakedness. In my first scene, I was naked. And from the first press conference on, I had to answer one question all the time: “Your character is so strong, why do you have to take off your clothes?” . I replied very slowly, but in my head I just wanted to scream:“How many people does she have to kill in the movie to prove herself?”
To relieve stress, I go to the gym. One of the essentials of being a TV actor is it: the gym. I still vividly remember, on the morning of February 11, 2011, I was in the changing room at a gym in Crouch End, North London, when I suddenly felt a headache. In an instant, it was so heavy that it made me dizzy, I could hardly put my shoes on. But I still go to the gym, and try to do the first few exercises.
Then came the time when the coach told me to lie down and do the plank, and immediately, I felt like my brain was being squeezed by a wire. I tried to ignore the pain, but I couldn’t. I told the coach I needed to take a few minutes off. Somehow, almost crawling away, I made it back to the dressing room, put my head over the sink and threw up. During that time, the pain in my head only increased, not decreased. And in my heart, I knew I was in very serious trouble.
For the next few months, I struggled to get over the pain and dizzy spells. I thought to myself, “How can you be paralyzed? ” And every time I think like that, I involuntarily stretch out my finger to make sure it’s still true. Memorizing lines from “Game of Thrones” helped me retain some of my mind, but it didn’t last forever.
Then came a time when I heard a woman’s voice from the next room, asking if I was okay. And I’m not fine at all. She ran over to help me up, and from then on, everything I remember was a blur. I remember vividly the ambulance sirens, the doctor’s voice, their diagnosis that my pulse was weakening. I vomited non-stop. Someone found my cell phone and called my parents, who were living in Oxfordshire at the time.
I was still not fully aware of everything around me, only vaguely feeling myself being put on a bed, taken to an ambulance, and then into a room that smelled of disinfectant. No one knew what was wrong with me, so the doctors couldn’t give me medicine to ease the pain. Finally, I was taken for a brain scan. The results were quick and unsettling: I had a subarachnoid hemorrhage (or SAH for short), a life-threatening type of stroke caused by blood flowing into the area surrounding the brain. I just had an aneurysm and a broken artery.
I later learned that about a third of patients with this condition will die immediately, or very soon after. For those lucky enough to survive, they need urgent treatment so that the aneurysm doesn’t burst. But even so, there is a very high chance of a second bleed, which can be fatal. If I’m lucky enough to survive that one time, the cost of treatment will be so high that I can’t even imagine. And even then, there was no guarantee all danger had passed.
At night, I was transferred to the National Institute of Neurology and Surgery, a beautiful red brick building in central London. My mother had to curl up to sleep on a chair in the visitation area, while I was in a coma, mixing pain, fatigue and nightmares.
I remember being given an application for surgery. Brain surgery? I’m in the middle of a busy life as an actor, how do I have time for brain surgery? But in the end, I also compromised and agreed to sign. Then I was sedated. Within 3 hours, the doctors cured my brain. But it wasn’t the last surgery, and it wasn’t the worst. At that time, I was only 24 years old.