Emilia Clarke: 'A bit of my brain actually died' during second aneurysm
Emilia Clarke is going into more detail about the severity of the second brain aneurysm that almost killed her in 2013.
Although the "Game of Thrones" star says she's now "100% in the clear" in terms of her neurological prognosis, she told "CBS Sunday Morning" that she suffered permanent brain damage as a result of her subarachnoid hemorrhage, a stroke caused by an artery rupturing and bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.
"With the second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died," she said. "If a part of your brain doesn't get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It's like you short-circuit. I had that."
The video included never-seen-before photos of Clarke in the hospital following both procedures. One shows her with a tube protruding from her head after her second surgery, which required doctors to drill into her skull.
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Clarke, now 32, says her doctors initially weren't sure which brain processes would be affected as a result.
"They were looking at the brain (scan) and going, 'Well, we think it could be her concentration, it could be her peripheral vision,' " she recalled. She quipped, "I always say it's my taste in men. It's no longer there."
For a long time, Clarke feared the stroke had robbed her of her ability to act.
"It was a deep paranoia – with the first one as well," she said. "What if something has short-circuited my brain and I can't act anymore? I mean – literally – it's been my reason for living for a very long time."
Clarke noted that while her first surgery was "difficult," she found it "much harder to stay optimistic" the second time around. "I definitely went through a period of being down, to put it mildly," she recalled.
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But eventually, she learned to draw strength from playing the Mother of Dragons.
"You go on set and you play a bad (expletive) and you walk through fire – and that became the thing that saved me from considering my own mortality."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Emilia Clarke: 'A bit of my brain actually died' during second aneurysm
