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Emilia Clarke has opened up about the long-term impact of her life-changing brain injury, including the discovery of another rare condition.
The Game of Thrones star, 39, secretly suffered from two brain aneurysms requiring major surgery in 2011 and 2013, while filming the early seasons of HBO’s fantasy megahit.
She kept her terrifying health ordeal to herself at the time, sharing it only with the showrunners, and eventually spoke about her experience in 2019, shortly before the release of the final season.
Since then, she has launched a brain injury recovery charity, SameYou, and been vocal about her own story, with new details of the struggles she faced still emerging.
In a new interview on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, she spoke candidly about how she neglected her recovery to concentrate on her career and has only recently dealt with the lingering repercussions of the brain trauma.
She explained: ‘I get my brain checked all the time and it’s completely fine. But there were other things that I now know [that] I’ve lived with as the result of a brain injury that only this year have I properly fixed, which is crazy.’
Asking the host if she had ever heard of the connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, she explained: ‘I have that. I’m on that spectrum, the hypermobile spectrum.
‘There are things that are a repercussion of having that, MCAS being one of them, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. It basically just means I have a lot of inflammation ’cause my body thinks it’s allergic to everything.’
What is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and MCAS?
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome
Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS) are a group of rare inherited conditions that affect connective tissue. Connective tissues provide support in skin, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, internal organs and bones.
You can read more on the NHS website here.
Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)
In people affected by MCAS, chemicals called mast cell mediators are released too frequently or abundantly, and/or in response to triggers that are not typically considered to be harmful, for example; foods or chemicals in the environment. This can lead to a wide range of symptoms that affect multiple parts of the body.
The British actor went on to praise her ‘remarkable doctor in America’, who she credited with ‘fixing everything’.
She concluded: ‘And I feel great in a way that I didn’t realise I could feel great, you know, ’cause you’re like: “It’s fine, because none of those things are interrupting my life to a massive degree.”‘
Emilia’s subarachnoid haemorrhage occurred between filming season one of GOT and the release, when she was in the gym with her trainer and knocked down by an ‘unbearable headache’.
She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors raced to figure out what was wrong with her. Just weeks later, she was doing press for the first season, determined to put the life-threatening incident behind her, especially over fears she ‘would be fired’.
Then, in 2013, she went for a now-routine brain scan where doctors detected a growth in her brain which had ‘doubled in size’.
During surgery, the procedure failed as she endured a ‘massive bleed’ and surgeons gained permission to open up her skull for an immediate ‘old-fashioned’ brain operation to save her life.
‘The recovery was even more painful than it had been after the first surgery,’ she said at the time.
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