Emilia Clarke, best known for her role as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, recently opened up about the brain aneurysms that almost took her life. In an essay for The New Yorker, Clarke said she suffered the first aneurysm when she was 24 years old, shortly after completing filming for season one of Game of Thrones. She was rushed to the E.R. after collapsing at the gym with an excruciating headache and was left with temporary aphasia, or language impairment, after her first surgery. Then doctors discovered a second aneurysm that required a second surgery. Clarke was terrified she’d never act again.

“My job—my entire dream of what my life would be—centered on language, around communication,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “Without that, I was lost.”

Now, in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Clarke has shared more about her surgeries and recovery—even sharing some new never-before-seen photos of herself in the hospital.

“So, with the second one, there was a bit of my brain that actually died,” she says of her second aneurysm in the interview. “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. So I had that. And they didn’t know what it was. They literally were looking at the brain and being like, ‘Well, we think it could be her concentration, it could be her peripheral vision [affected].'”

“I always say it’s my taste in men that’s no longer there,” she continues. “That’s the part of my brain, yeah, my decent taste in men.”

While she’s able to joke about it now, there was a time when the actress was very scared about what her future might look like. “I was like, ‘What if something has short-circuited in my brain and I can’t act anymore?'” she says. “I mean, literally it’s been my reason for living for a very long time.”

See Clarke’s hospital photos—and the full interview—below:

In the interview Clarke reveals that she actually found it easier to stay optimistic during her second surgery and recovery than her first. When asked how she got through it all, the mother of dragons answered, “That was very much like a day-to-day thing. And I definitely went through a period of being down, putting it mildly.”

Luckily, Clarke did indeed pull through and has since founded a charity called SameYou, which is focused on brain injury recovery and rehabilitation.

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