Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame thanked healthcare workers as she remembered her life-threatening health scare back in 2011 and 2013. The actress who played Daenerys Targaryen in the hit HBO series suffered an unexpected brain haemorrhage in 2011. She wrote a thank you note to all the healthcare workers in a new book, giving tribute to medical workers in the UK. In 2011, Emilia faced a scary health scare after an exercise in London, England. In the book, Dear NHS: 100 Stories to Say Thank You, she shared her experience with the health workers.
The book pays respect to England’s National Health Service workers who are taking care of people during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“The memories I will hold dearest, though, are ones that fill me with awe: of the nurses and doctors, I knew by name when, in the weeks after my first brain haemorrhage, we watched the passing of time and the passing of patients in the Victor Horsley Ward at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London,” Emilia wrote in her piece, which was published by The Times on Sunday.
“The nurse who suggested–after everyone else struggled to find an answer when I was first admitted–that maybe, just maybe I should have a brain scan. She saved my life,” said Emilia, 33 in the book.
The Last Christmas actress also praised the anaesthetist who had her and her family members “giggling” before she went under the knife, and the surgeon who worked to save her without ever “letting on how close to death I had been.” Those who cared and cleaned up after her were also mentioned.
“The countless unthanked nurses who changed my catheter and cleaned up my vomit on the days when I couldn’t even manage water,” she wrote. “The nurses who washed my body with care and love when I couldn’t walk or sit, who put me in pyjamas I recognised as my own when my morale dipped below the surface, with as much kindness as if I had been their own daughter.” “The cleaners who mopped the floor when my bedpan fell to the ground, shame and embarrassment filling the room along with disinfectant, and then a reassuring smile and a knowledge that they’d seen worse,” she added.
In a piece for the New Yorker in March 2019 Emilia opened up about her health scare, saying how she was “violently, voluminously ill” after cutting short a session with her personal trainer–during which she had felt like “an elastic band were squeezing my brain.” While lying on the floor desperately trying to engage and test her memory, she tried to recall some of her lines from Game of Thrones.
While Emilia returned to the series six weeks after the ordeal, she suffered another brain haemorrhage two years later in 2013. “The second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died,” Emilia told CBS Sunday Morning. “If a part of your brain doesn’t get blood to it for a minute, it will just no longer work. It’s like your short circuit.” “I always say it’s my taste in men that’s no longer there! That’s the part of my brain–my decent taste in men,” she also joked, before admitting she feared her acting skills might be impacted. Emilia noted that her role as Daenerys Targaryen and getting to “go on set, play a badass and walk through fire,” had helped her through the trauma. /TISG