This is a story about Emilia, but it could just as easily be a story about anyone, anywhere, anytime, rich or poor, of any age, culture, background, beliefs or lifestyle. These factors don’t matter. Not in this story.
Thirteen years ago, Emilia, a young English woman from Oxfordshire, a 24-year-old graduate, was less than a year into her first big job. The get-by, rent-paying, part-time pub, call-centre and museum attendant days were behind her. Fit, healthy and with the break she needed in a profession she was passionate about, Emilia was going places.
On this particular day she was headed to the gym. Dismissing a bad headache as she got changed, Emilia found the first few exercises with her trainer much harder than before. The plank position proving completely unachievable, she offered apologies to her trainer, made it to the toilet and was violently, uncontrollably ill. She later recalled a ‘shooting, stabbing, constricting pain.’ At some level, she said, as the pain and nausea overwhelmed her, she knew what was happening. In some inexplicable, unimaginable way, her brain was damaged.
Another woman came to her aid. Sirens. An ambulance. Someone saying her pulse was weak. Drifting in and out of consciousness. A hospital corridor. The smell of disinfectant. A brain scan. A frightening diagnosis. In no time at all Emilia, a picture of health, had become a patient in need of life-saving surgery.
The medical term for what happened to her at the gym is subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), a sudden leak of blood over the surface of the brain. The result of an aneurysm that develops inside the brain – when a blood vessel bulges and ruptures – can be life-threatening. It can cause extensive brain damage. As Emilia and her family quickly learned, without immediate surgery to seal off the aneurysm, there was a high risk of a second, potentially fatal bleed. Only later did Emilia discover that around one third of SAH patients die in the early hours, days and weeks of the first haemorrhage. Only later did she realise how lucky she had been.
Within two months Emilia was back at work, but still living in fear of life being stolen from her at any moment. More surgery followed. More weeks in hospital. Wave after wave of anxiety, panic over living her last days mixed with dread of surviving with loss: loss of memory, of language, of senses, of being Emilia. For so long, recovery, freedom from fear, seemed elusive.
Until weeks became months, months became years. Until Emilia recognised, as she put it, ‘I have healed beyond my most unreasonable hopes.’ The survivor then resolved neither to put as much distance as possible between her and the trauma she had endured; nor to satisfy a desire to help other survivors by becoming a donor to good causes active in related medical research.
Emilia decided instead to go further, much further, as philanthropists do. When the pulse of philanthropy is strong, being charitable is not enough. Action that is both urgent and long-term is needed. New solutions have to be found. For a philanthropist, it feels unacceptable to wait for others to act, to wait for someone else to innovate, to collaborate, to address an issue that is affecting so many people. With strong support and encouragement from her mum in particular, Emilia would develop and be the driving force behind a new charity, active on both sides of the Atlantic. She set up this new mechanism for philanthropy in 2019 and called it Same You.
In its first five years Same You has delivered groundbreaking research, collaborated with leading universities, become a founding member of the World Health Organisation’s World Rehabilitation Alliance and, not least, given comfort, hope and strength to SAH survivors everywhere. Through its support resource called Portraits, Same You has created an online platform for all brain injury survivors to relate their experience and share how they have coped. It is not only Emilia’s story that is now resonating with so many.
Emilia Clarke’s SAH occurred in 2011 just after the filming of the first series of Game Of Thrones had finished. As Daenerys Tagaryen she had played a leading role, one that would make her a globally famous actor. Only SAH had no respect for Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons. The survivor of this unexpected and devastating brain injury nevertheless converted her off-screen life-and-death struggle into a philanthropy that is changing lives. She is not unscathed, not unaffected, but unyielding, unrelenting, unchanged. Same Emilia.