Emilia Clarke and her mother Jenny have been appointed MBEs for founding a brain injury recovery charity after the Game Of Thrones star suffered two aneurysms
Emilia Clarke has been appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) alongside her mother Jenny for their brain injury charity work.
The 37-year-old actress and her mother Jenny decided to set up brain injury recovery charity SameYou after Emilia survived two brain haemorrhages.
Emilia said it was “life-enhancing and magical” to see her mother, who also underwent surgery to remove a brain aneurysm, recognized for her charity work alongside her.
She said: ‘It’s such an incredible honour, such an incredible privilege, and the most important thing for us is that it applies to everyone with a brain injury.
Emilia Clarke has been appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) alongside her mother Jenny for their brain injury charity work
The 37-year-old actress and her mother Jenny decided to set up SameYou, a brain injury recovery charity, after Emilia survived two brain haemorrhages
“We were so lucky to have had this near-death experience and to have gone through the darkness of it all and come out of it.”
Emilia first suffered a bleed on her brain in 2011, just after the first series of Game Of Thrones finished filming, and lost her ability to speak as she nearly fell into a coma.
Her second bleed in 2013 required surgery after scans showed the bleed had doubled in size. Emilia has previously told how she was one of the ‘really small minority’ of people who survived and were left ‘without consequences’.
She suffered from the subarachnoid hemorrhage after an aneurysm – a weak area in a blood vessel – burst on the surface of her brain.
They are most common in people between the ages of 45 and 70 and can cause sufferers to experience extreme fatigue, sleep problems, headaches, visual disturbances and loss of movement, but Emilia has previously said she remained unaffected,
This experience led Emilia and her mother Jennifer to set up the charity SameYou to raise money and help increase access to neurorehabilitation after brain injury and stroke.
Emilia has spoken openly about surviving two brain aneurysms and previously admitted she was ‘more afraid of being fired than dying’.
She said last month Harper’s Bazaar: ‘I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of getting fired! I decided, ”This is not something that is going to define me”. I never gave in to any feeling of ‘Why me? This is stupid’. I was like, I have to get back to it.
Emilia and her mother Jenny have now been recognized for their charity work as they have been made MBEs as part of the New Years Honors
Emilia first suffered a bleed on her brain in 2011, just after the first series of Game Of Thrones finished filming, and lost her ability to speak as she nearly fell into a coma.
Her second bleed in 2013 required surgery after scans showed it had doubled in size, and Emilia has told how she was one of the ‘minority’ to survive and leave ‘without consequences’
‘If I’m completely honest, I was very embarrassed by the whole thing. Like I was broken. As if the producers must think I’m some unreliable person they hired.
‘If I hadn’t had a brain haemorrhage, I might have become a real old fart who thought I was the bee’s knee, living in Hollywood. I am so much more aware of what is happening, when it is happening.
‘I don’t worry about failure – I thrive on failure! When something goes wrong, I always think you can fix it. It hurts, it’s scary, but then you can do anything.’
In July 2022, Emilia explained how she would no longer be able to speak after two aneurysms left parts of her brain ‘no longer usable’.
She told Sophie Raworth on BBC1’s Sunday Morning: ‘You get a lot of perspective. The part of my brain that is no longer useful… There’s quite a bit missing and that always makes me laugh.’
Her life-saving treatment left her with titanium in place of parts of her skull and scars.