Brain Health and Resilience: Fireside Chat with Emilia Clarke and Bennet Omalu | Salesforce

Wow.

Every time I hear him speak, it's just so powerful. I'm thinking my head is swirling with this idea that the real me is dancing with a cosmic symphony. That just is awesome. Okay, so our next speakers. Who here is familiar with the work, just by show of hands, of Dr. Bennett Amalu?

Anyone?

Yeah. This is a remarkable human being. Dr. Amalu is a forensic pathologist and a neuropathologist, but he is also eligible a whole new narrative into our culture around the long term impacts of contact sports and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or brain injury. As a mom of two young budding sportos, his research has really impacted our home and the kinds of sports that we're kind of steering our kids to. So I'm very excited to be able to be with him here today. And he is going to be interviewing the one and only mother of Dragons, Emilia Clarke.

Yeah.

It'S cool to geek out. It's cool to geek out. As much as we loved watching her on Game of Thrones, the real heroic tale here is her journey to health and recovery after suffering from not one, but two brain aneurysms, multiple brain surgeries. And she walked away from that experience with so many life lessons and passions around how to get more access to to people who have suffered from brain injury and stroke. And so she has started a new foundation called SameYou.org, which you are gonna hear more about. So, ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome Dr. Bennett Amalu and Amelia Clarke.

Thank you. Thank you.

Welcome.

Thanks. Right.

Thank you so much for having us.

I'm feeling very calm, very Zen.

What an honor for me to be sharing this stage with Amelia.

Thank you, guys. Thank you.

You know, I don't know how many of you know about me. I'm not ashamed to say it. All my life I struggled with depression and low self esteem. And just last week, reading about Amelia, I was so much inspired by Amelia's story. And I deeply want to thank you for what you've done for me. And in the next 45 minutes, I believe she would do a lot more for you. So I'm very honored to be here with you and I'm thankful.

Thank you. Likewise.

Thank you. Now, let me ask you, by a raise of hands, how many of you have heard of Samuel?

Oh, while we're listening to the intro. That's good.

Quite a good number. So my objective this morning is that after 45 minutes, you would visit the website sameu.org, see what it's all about, and help Emilio to help all of us. I've examined over 12,000 brains and bodies. I talk to the dead. And we all are members of one another. We are one common family. Whatever one person does affects all of us. So one person can make a difference. Amelia is making a difference with her story. So to start, Amelia, could you share with us what your childhood was like? I knew you grew up.

Should I be lying down?

You grew up in Oxfordshire, in Oxford.

I did, yes.

Could you tell us about that? You made up your mind at about 3, 4 years old to become an actor. Your father wasn't too happy with that.

No, no, no, no. I was three when I said I wanted to be an actor. I was pretty bloody minded about it. My dad worked as a sound designer for the theater, so I think I was aware of what the world might be. But he was in the crew, so therefore he considered actors to be rather crazy and neurotic. So it was my determination to be a non crazy, non neurot. Yeah, we're seeing how that goes. But, yeah, I had a gorgeous childhood. It was idyllic. It was lovely. It was, yeah. No health scares, no early signs of anything. I mean, when I was 14, I had a kind of intense migraine that lasted two days, which maybe, maybe, maybe we consider might be a precursor to what I had, but it's not. That's not.

And when you were five years old, you had your first play in school, you went to private school and you got to the stage, you forgot your line.

Yes.

All your teachers decided that. What happened?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's me, five years old, on the stage, having won this part and feeling very good about it, and probably about this amount of people were there. It was a big school and completely forgot my lines, but seemed quite content still standing on the stage, just with an audience.

Yes.

Apparently that was enough. I didn't need to know the lines. I was very confident in just being on the stage. It felt. Yeah.

And you absorbed it all. You were not excited, you were not anxious and there was something.

No, no, no.

You were unfazed.

Yeah. It was a weird thing. I think that's probably when my parents saw that I had a possibility of being a performer of some kind, because I seemed very at home with lots of people watching me. So that says a lot.

You know something about that. At that age, I was. I had such a low self esteem. I was so afraid of myself.

Yeah.

But at such a young age, you took control of yourself.

Well, I'm much better in front of this many people than I am in Front of six, Six people at dinner party makes me very worried. But this many people, somehow it all just becomes a bit more.

But even at such a young age, you wanted to take to do things that had some level of purpose, some futuristic capacity that would enhance who you were.

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to be. I think I've always wanted from a very young age to be useful, to be helpful, to be. I don't know, it kind of. I always. In my family dynamic, that's what I've always done. And a way of being useful is, I think from a very early age, I wanted to connect with people. That was always a really big desire of mine. And I realized then at 5 or earlier or later, and then reaffirmed much later. The telling of stories was how I could do that, was how I could connect with people.

You know, how life steals upon you. When you were a kid, you had some symptoms like many other people had some migraines, even passed out sometimes. But that never gave you any inkling of what was to come.

Well, I'm only little, you see, so I've got naturally low blood pressure. And then I would push myself incredibly hard from a very. I've always been very diligent with my work. I've always. That was the, you know, trying to not be a crazy, neurotic actress. I thought if I worked really, really, really hard, then that would kind of counteract that from ever happening. So at drama school, I worked myself as hard as I could and resulted in passing out sometimes and lightheadedness and blood pressure and all of those things. But again, that's something. If you go to a doctor, you could check your iron, check this, check magnesium, check that you're drinking enough water or not drinking too much alcohol or whatever it might be. So all of those kind of symptoms, I think are. Can be placed in a million other categories before you would ever think for one second to get a brain scan.

Yeah. Now life was good for you. You were on Game of Thrones.

Yes. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. There we go.

And life was on an expressway. You were doing extra busy. Well, until I remember it, February 11, 2011.

2011, that's exactly.

You woke up that morning like each and every one of us.

Yeah.

What happened?

Well, so this was season one we had wrapped, and season one was a. Was a head spin and a half because I had, you know, seen a film camera once before filming Game of Thrones because I came out of drama school, had a year of lots of jobs and as in non acting jobs, and then and then was on the show left. And so the reason why I'm saying this is because I was in a really, you know, high state of. Not anxiety, but kind of. There was a lot of energy. I was experiencing a huge amount of energy for the first time properly. And then went and did a bit of a press tour in America. Another kind of complete. I don't know where I am or what's going on or I was. So you guys just heard, Deepak. I was so out of my body. I was so not in the present moment for such a consistent amount of time. And then woke up and was in the gym. As if that isn't bad enough, I then had a brain hemorrhage. So that has made it worse. I was exhausted. I remember very vividly being incredibly, incredibly tired. Which after the kind of everything that had been happening to me in the previous year, it sort of seemed natural, but I pushed through it and pushed through it and pushed through it and pushed through it and then was in the plank. And it was just the single most excruciating pain you could possibly imagine. And I had a lovely personal trainer who was saying, a headache doesn't seem like the right reaction to a plank. Maybe your abs should be hurting, your legs or whatever it might be, but not your head. That's remarkable. And then I started to feel incredibly ill. Kind of crawled to the bathroom and was being violently ill. Really, really, really violently ill. And for whatever reason, something I'd read or something I'd seen, I knew I was being brain damaged. I don't know how. I mean, I didn't know that the combination of throwing up and also the headache, that's. It's. I mean, I've had migraines. It's migraines times 100. And I knew I was fighting a coma. I knew I was fighting slipping out.

Of consciousness and what was going on in your mind?

I was absolutely hell bent on not being a neurotic actress. That was pretty much it. I just. It was just like, no, no, this isn't even a question. That's not happening. I will absolutely not be brain damaged. That's not an option. That's not happening to me today. So I was. All the illness and all the headache and trying to move my fingers and my toes and trying to think about my feet and think about my legs and make sure they were still working and make sure that my arms were still working and what's my full name, which is really long, kind of has now forever in a day become this thing that I repeat to myself whenever I get a. Oh, my God, I'm getting a headache. Amelia, Isabelle, Euphemia, Rose, Clark. Almost as many as Daenerys. It's a theme.

So you went into the hospital, somebody saw you.

So, yeah, there was a kindly person who hurt. I don't know who this. I've never seen this person's face, because I was. I couldn't kind of focus. And she called an ambulance. She heard me being ill, she took me out of the bathroom, put in the recovery position, called the ambulance. Then I'm in hospital and my parents are called, and they barely recognized me because I was in so much pain. You sort of become almost unrecognizable. And no one in the hospital knew what on earth it was. So I was unable to get any drugs to ease the pain because they can't treat anyone until they know what's wrong. So I was there for a number of hours in this hospital on a Saturday night. And then one of the nurses, her husband was a brain surgeon, and she said, I think you need a brain scan. That's the kind of last thing that maybe you should. And then they took me in for a brain scan and saw that I had a huge amount of bleeding on the brain.

You know what happened? Each and every minute they waited at the hospital. Your brain was undergoing some further injury?

Yes.

Then a CT scan was eventually done.

Yes.

And Amelia was told she had a brain bleed, a massive brain bleed. Subarachnoidal hemorrhage from a ruptured blood vessel we call an aneurysm. And now, to give you how serious this was, 40 to 60% of people who suffer ruptured brain aneurysms die. 40 to 60%. And when it ruptures, you bleed out. Your blood vessels go into spasm and cause further brain damage. But guess what? Amelia beat death. How did you do?

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Remember the child we were talking about, who was on phase, who was very reassured, who knew no fear? That all came to you when you were 24 with the ruptured brain aneurysm. How did you do that?

Oh, Christ, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not very good as a person. It's kind of seeing a problem and not seeing a way through it. Genuinely, it's like a knee jerk reaction. I need to learn to just let things be a little bit more. But with this, it was an. It was a purely instinctive thing. I was young. I was at the start of My career, I felt incredibly scared, but optimistic and hopeful about what the future might look like. And so I just. It was. I suppose it's just a guttural reaction of not letting that. I fought, basically. I fought with every single fiber of my being I had. There was nothing to lose and everything and life to gain, literally. So that was the single thought that got me through. But then the funny thing is, is when you're then in the operating theater and I had a successful operation, that first one, and. And then you're there for three weeks going, you want me to what? I've just got to sit here and feel awful and I can't do anything anymore. And that's when the kind of fight that I had, that's when it starts to. To kind of be put under scrutiny because then you're being asked to be present. You're being asked to kind of try and be okay with just healing. But luckily for. I mean, I had something called dysphagia, which is pretty horrific. It's basically locked in syndrome. So I was. I woke up and they wake you up every two hours when you're in intensive care and this nurse wakes you up and they say, what's your full name? As you've heard, it's quite a few. And what, you know, what date is it? Where are you? Those kind of questions. And this woman asked me, and apparently I. I came up with complete nonsense. And I knew she asked me what my name was and I couldn't say it at all. And that was. That was way scarier. That was. That was probably the single hardest thing, because not being able to communicate. And as I've said, the kind of. My whole reason for being as a human was to communicate and connect with people and tell stories. And in that moment I realized that I couldn't. And that's something that people live with for much longer than I did. I had about three days of it. My mum was a complete hero. And they obviously called my parents in who was staying in a really, really, really awful hotel next to the hospital. And she came in and I was obviously saying gobbledygook. I was kind of going in and out of consciousness of realizing that I wasn't making any sense and then going through phases of just saying, fish and chips, fish and chips, fish and chips, or whatever it might be. I mean, maybe I was hungry probably, and my mom just looked at me when I was clearly not making any sense and looked at me and went, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, totally agree. Yeah, 100%. Right, cool. What's next? Good point. Never heard that one before. That's interesting. And so kind of made me feel like I was making sense. But anyway, they then took me back into the icu.

Icu.

And I got a lot of adrenaline and they did all that they could because I was this young. Because I was young, I think they were. They normally see with strokes, obviously, people of an older generation than I was. And I luckily came through that and was able to. But that's the only moment with the first brain hemorrhage that I. That I was. I just wanted to die. I had absolutely no. No reason in my mind to keep living.

And this is what really inspires me about you. When you became a physic, couldn't speak, she was overcome with fear. You found yourself in this abyss of hopelessness.

Yeah.

And reading it, I stopped. You were not afraid of being afraid.

Yeah.

Okay. In spite of the hopelessness, there was something in you that gave you hope.

Yeah.

You know, and in fact, while she was in icu, in spite of her problems, you were aware of other patients in icu?

Well, yes. So that was in the second time when I was in ICU with the aphasia. I mean, in the icu, people die there quite a lot. And when someone is dying, literally in that moment, they ask relatives who might be in the room to leave. And so they asked my mum to leave, who was with me, and she said no. And I was incredibly feeling pretty awful about hearing this and not really knowing what to do and not being able to communicate myself. And she just told me a story.

She just told me a story.

Told me a story about someone at work. Could she not be interested in the gossip? And distracted me? It's good gossip. It's good gossip stories. That's the bedrock of stories. It's just gossip. And so she started telling me about this kind of gossipy story and distracted me to the point where the person who was dying next to me was. You know, it was. It stopped being something that could be my future and began to be just simply the place in which we were in. And. And being able to be in hospital for that long and being in intensive care, and I've now seen it three times because I lost my dad, so he was there as well. And being around human suffering, there is no greater way of making yourself feel lucky, you know, to be living and lucky for everything that you might have in that moment. And it's. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, those experiences.

You know what I tell people I teach, that you don't need to be afraid of who you are. Yeah, you don't need to be afraid of fear. Embrace your fears. Recognize your fears, but have the courage to overcome your fears, to turn them around. Create value from your fears. And I think that was exactly what you did.

Yeah, I mean, I naturally have a lot of energy and I think that's where the fight comes from.

Yet kind of even one month, within one month of being released from the icu, went back to work to do season.

Yeah, yeah. So you're three weeks in hospital going, I'm going to get a bath, I'm going to see daylight, I'm going to be outside. Which becomes this amazing thing that you. There's not a huge amount of windows in a lot of hospitals in England anyway and where we were. And all you want is fresh air and all you want is your home. And so then you finally leave and it's a euphoric, gorgeous moment and you get home and you go, what? Everyone's just been telling me for three weeks that I'm going to die, that this is really serious, that I need to be really careful with myself. Not only that, but I. Because it was a non invasive surgery the first time they went through the femur artery and round the heart and into your brain and used copper coils to stop the bleeding, I looked completely fine, despite the fact that every car I got into I banged my head, which is really infuriating. I got home and I found a reason to go back to AE that night. So the IV that I'd been having for three weeks was a little bit infected. I mean, I needed an antiseptic cream, that's about it. But I made my loving family turn around and take me back to A and E. Because it wasn't because I was scared of my infected hand, it was because I was scared to be home, which is ridiculous because you spent three weeks dreaming of going home and dreaming of having that. And. And that the essence of that is what recovery is. And the essence of that is what people have to live with day in and day out when you've faced death and when you've been incredibly ill. And it's not the thing that people immediately think of is that when you get home you don't trust yourself and you don't trust environment that has once been felt familiar and you resent the place that you've been in the hospital bed and it all feels very alien and you're not sick anymore, but it's a real difficult one to get your head Around. So a lot of fear, a lot of morphine to kind of get you through. And then I think within about. I think I had about four weeks, probably at home, and then continued doing promotion for season one of the show. But we couldn't tell HBO anything about it. We couldn't tell my new fancy American agents anything about it until they knew I wasn't gonna die. So when I came home, then I could say, funny story, I'm fine. I mean, I was out for a minute. Sorry not to reply to your emails. I'm absolutely fine. And then it turned into this thing of me being a young actress that was insanely lucky to be there and filled with imposter syndrome, and just the only thing I was scared of was being fired, as opposed to being scared of the brain hemorrhages.

You know something, I don't know how many of us may know it. When you're born, you're born with a certain number of brain cells, but your brain weighs about 400 grams. And then you can only lose your brain cells. You cannot create new brain cells. The brain does not have any reasonable capacity to regenerate itself. So if you suffer any form of brain injury, that is it, it's permanent, you lose a brain cell, you've lost it. And Emilio went through a very severe.

Type of brain injury, maybe had a few to spare.

Yes. And we, as physicians, we may have the best care for acute care. They go in, they clip the aneurysm. You had a second aneurysm and a second surgery?

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

About two years later, right?

Bigger, yeah. So I had mirror aneurysms, which is incredibly common because you have. If you have the weakness, if you're born with a weakness on your arteries, your brain is then formed into the two sides. That weakness is mirrored. So the first one ruptured, as you just heard, and then they said, there is a second one. You need to keep an eye on it. So I was insanely, insanely lucky. I'm 0.0 percentile of people who have what I had without any repercussions, any mental physical repercussions. I mean, they checked and asked my family if I was just bad at maths, and I am. So that was fine. That was like the only thing that they kind of was slightly skewed on. So they said, you know, you've got this other one on the other side. Just keep an eye on it. So then I went back to work. You know, a huge amount of fatigue, which is the main thing that happens universally when you have a brain injury, regardless of what other physical repercussions you might have, fatigue is something you do suffer with, which is, it's just tiredness, it's just. But it's a kind of you physically can't stand up kind of tiredness, which is a young 20 year old that's really infuriating when all of your friends are standing up till, you know, 4am and you're there going, I just need a little sit down. And that brings with it all of its own things. But they said keep an eye on it. So then two years later I'm on a bad play on Broadway and coming to the end of my SAG medical, so I thought I'd go and get a brain scan, which I was getting twice a year to kind of check on the other one. And they said that it had doubled in size the second one and that I should go in and have the same procedure as I had with the first one in a preventative form so that nothing would happen. So I go in to do that and I'm petrified, obviously, because you get a little kind of triggered by going back into hospital for the same thing. But I think, right, two hours, I'll come round and everything will be fine and I'll go back to work and it's all good. And a number of hours later I was brought round because the coils had got stuck and I'd had a much bigger bleed even than the first one. And they didn't know what to do. It's. It's caught. You know, operations go wrong like that does sometimes. Some don't get worried. Sometimes happen. Not all the time, but just sometimes. And, and it happened and they had to bring me round to ask me if it was all right to cut my head open. Obviously I never thought I'd feel that pain again. And came round in this kind of, in the, in the surgery, in the room and was asked this question and kind of was finding difficult to speak anyway, but obviously gave it the A, okay. My parents were there and they couldn't kind of do it for me. And luckily for me there was a surgeon who was lecturing very close, who was wonderful at cracking heads open and fixing them because it's a different team that would do the calling, that would do the clamping. So then I was rushed into to have that emergency procedure and they're pretty sure I died for a minute and then was brought back and it was a. That was a very complicated thing. And then two, I miraculously made it they were incredibly worried I'd lost my peripheral vision. They were worried about a number of things that could have gone wrong as to where the bleed was on that side of my brain. And the thing about having tried both ways, I recommend the first, because the physical trauma when your skull is cut open plus the bleed is. Then you're dealing with two different things. And that was just horrific. That was just really, really awful.

I know she may not want me to tell you, but she's got some titanium plate in her skull.

I do. I don't set off alarms, though. So if I may ask, Handy.

If I may ask you share with all of us what saw you through. What did you do?

Well, this.

Cause you're doing so well, you got back to your job.

Yeah.

What did Emilio do?

Well, the second time? I mean, I was raised to never say poor me. I was raised to kind of. There's always someone who's much worse off, so just don't even give it a second to consider. Oh, that's a bit rubbish for myself. But it was incredibly, incredibly difficult to not. To not do that with this second one, because it's happened twice at this point. But I'm just pathologically hopeful. Pathologically human being.

Did he hear that?

It kind of. You know, I woke up every day and I kept waking up every day, and there were a number of different things. My job being a really big one, the show. By that point, we were up to season three, so I knew I was coming back for season four. At least I think I hoped I was coming back for season four. And I had, up until the age of three, invested so much of my hopes and dreams and wishes for myself, for my family, for the home that I'd created. I'd put so much into that that not living to see it. Just when the crunch time came, it wasn't an option to not. It wasn't an option to not fight for that. And it's the fight part of me that I think is probably the strongest and to kind of, you know, to prove yourself wrong, to prove other people wrong, that you are strong enough to do it, that you might be five foot tall too, and little English girl, but you're capable of overcoming this. And I just. I was. I. I've been incredibly supported by the. By the people that have been around me in my life.

Especially your mother.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She gets a lot of air time in this conversation. Yeah. Yes. Give her a round of applause. Yeah. How's. Yeah. But, yeah, I just. It's the Appetite for life, which has diminished at many points in my life. But. But that. But at this, at that point, you know, at the crunch time, it does. It does kind of come out to be stronger.

Thank you so much. Thank you. You know, going back to the permanent brain injury aspect of it.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes, including myself, we ashamed. We victimize ourselves by brain trauma. The unfortunate thing about brain injury is we don't see it.

Yeah.

It's not like a fracture of the leg. And they're usually persistent symptoms. Mood disorders, cognitive impairment, behavioral impairment, including drug abuse, impulsivity, and others. You said yours was a poor taste in men.

That's what's gone. That's what we think is gone. Weirder coming out of his mouth, isn't it? Yeah.

So how have you dealt with the long term?

That's another story. That's a different conversation. Christ. Excellent to have you all here.

But how have you dealt with the long term effects of.

Well, with the second. With the second brain injury. And this is something that people do speak of to speak of a lot when you've had a brain injury. I couldn't look anyone in the eye the second time around. I was. I was vaguely recognizable. I mean, I still had brown hair, and it was. I was not being stopped on the street is maybe as much as I might be now. But it was the biggest fear I had in this, throughout the recovery of the second one was being recognized. It was. I mean, I physically. I couldn't look my family in the eye. I couldn't look doctors in the eye. I couldn't. I just wanted to disappear with everything that I had. I was alive and I was fighting to be alive, but I was not ready to fight to be in the room and to look people and to kind of give them that gaze. And that comes from a complete lack of trust of yourself. Because if you think about the brain, really, it's whatever you hold as the thing that makes you you, the thing that makes you unique and individual as a human being. It's there. It's all housed in your mind. And when that fails you, I mean, no one in this world has complete 100% confidence. And if they do, they're in a different sort of sphere. But without, you know, having that little bit of lack of self belief put on top of that clinically, your body telling you that you're not good enough, your body telling you that you're not strong enough, that it has failed you. It's a kind of philosophical debate that you can have with yourself that makes you resistant to connect with any other human being because you don't even know what's going on here. It's completely alienating and entirely frightening and leaves you feeling profoundly alone because no one can see it, no one can understand it. If you break your leg, at least you, you're aware that that part of your body needs to be protected. But with your mind that takes care of everything, then there's no part of you that doesn't need to be protected, it doesn't need to be held close. And if you're not supported in that process, you got nothing. And it's incredibly frightening. So I know that my dad went through phases of wondering whether I was left with a, with a much more permanent problem because I couldn't connect to, I couldn't look anyone in the eye and I couldn't have this. So that was my biggest recovery process, was going, finding, navigating my way through what that was. I've rambled so much, I'm not sure.

If I. Oh, no, no, no, no. But if you noted after the acute care.

Yeah.

When you were having your problems, they went unnoticed by the medical industry.

Yeah.

I sit on the California State Traumatic Brain Injury Board and there's almost a complete absence of long term care for people who've suffered brain injury.

Yes. Well, all the funds goes into acute and for good reason, because we want to save people's lives. But the real thing that we don't realize is that the lives that those, the people who live after a brain injury the rest of their lives, that's what we need to save. Because without Game of Thrones, without a loving, supporting family, without the fight that I was naturally born with, without my pathological hopefulness and terrible taste in men, without all of those things, I wouldn't have been able to navigate my way through. And there are so many. And I wasn't a single mum with three kids and two jobs. That wasn't me. So I wasn't tested in that way. And if I was, you need support. And that is, that's the life that we're able to save in the recovery process. That is a completely white space. Space. Because there is really nothing.

There's nothing. That's nothing.

Absolutely. There's not a continual continuity of care. There's not. You know, it just needs a human being checking with that person. It needs a human being who has the answers to your questions at 2 in the morning when you go. I've had a headache now for two hours and I think I'm having another brain Hemorrhage. Am I going to die? No, you're not. I can talk you through this. We can. We can approach this from a different, more holistic way, which is what our charity is a mind, body, soul combination. And it's with that that hopefully we can start to give people a life that they recognize or that they want to live.

What Emilia has done, being the good hearted person she is, the altruistic person, you were, you were there in the ICU struggling with your health, yet you cared about other patients. So this tells us who you are. And what she has done, actually, is to set up a foundation called SameYou.s A M E Y O U. Same U. Meaning in spite of brain injury, you still need to be who you are. And it's SameYou.org and what she's done. Believe me if I tell you this. In 1969, the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London established that when you suffer any form of brain injury, it is permanent.

Yeah.

And at some time, the symptoms of the brain injury you suffered may take up to 42 years to manifest.

Wow.

So after your acute care till death, we almost have no systematic care for brain injury patients.

Yeah.

So Amelia wants to change that, and she is changing that, but she is asking for help. She's asking for our help. And like I said earlier, we are one greater family members of one another. What one person does affects all of us. So tell us about same year.

Well, I mean, I don't know what the slides have been doing, but one in three of us will have a brain injury, which is a lot. It's a really big thing. It affects more people than. I think the statistics that we're coming up with now are under. They're underrepresented because people don't come forward about having had a brain injury. It also can affect the jobs that you might have and all of these sorts of things. But it's a huge global issue that has nowhere near enough limelight. And so what we're doing with same U is that we are trying to shine the light on recovery, on brain injury recovery for. Largely for young people, obviously, because it happened to me and. And when it happens to a young person, just when you're trying to figure out what your life might look like, it changes forever. And without the guidance and support to be able to live the life that you hope and dream and are hopeful that you might be able to live, then you've got nothing. So we're eight months old, we're very young, and we have created a brand new Unique training program for nurses which is the first of its kind because this kind of approach to recovery doesn't exist until now. Also I raised, I did a, an Omaze campaign where I did a kind of Game of Thrones themed, dressed up as Jon Snow. It's very fun. Went through Times Square. It was very, very fun. And, and that raised a whopping million, which was amazing. And that has gone into to a research centre at Spaulding in Boston and they are looking into brain resilience. And so what can our brain, what are our brains capable of especially within young people after an injury? And how can we capitalize on that? Basically. But the main thing that our charity would like to do now is we'd like to hear other people's stories. And we want to bring together world leaders and try and work out how to fix this problem globally. Because it is a massive global issue that affects, like I said, lives upon lives upon lives of people. And so we're looking for people to come together with us and help us come up with the next wave of ideas as to how we can do that.

And another thing, you know, as a patient of depression and low self esteem, when people suffer from brain illnesses, as usual, it is stigma that our company is shame. People don't want to publicly talk about your problems.

Yeah.

And even when they talk about your problems, they don't get the empathy they need.

Yeah.

So I think you're doing a phenomenal job.

Thank you.

And I'm deeply thankful you're using your platform to make a difference. Difference.

Thanks.

As even if you were to make a difference, even in the life of just one person, you've done a wonderful job.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you for that. I, I, I, I will pray for you, do what I could to help you.

Thank you.

But please, please, it takes only one person. Visit SameYou.org donate money if you don't have the time. If you have the time, give them your time. But we need to first change the mental attitude.

Absolutely. We need to change the stigma. Bringing awareness to this massive problem would be an enormous step change in how we see it. So the more people that are able to be educated about it, which is what we're trying to do, and bring awareness to the problem would be a huge step forward.

Wonderful. I believe you've had some great information. It's been fun. When I travel around the world, I tell people that there is nothing like an impossibility. The impossible is meant to become possible. If you don't believe that. Look at Amelia's life and story. Amelia came close to death twice or three times, but she overcame it. I look at what she's doing with that experience. Creating value from a negative experience. As they say, debt where lies your victory? Fear, where lies your victory. So, Emilio, we are deeply grateful.

Thank you.

I'm thankful. So SameYou.org that is our take up. SameYou.org Empower Emilio. Empower another human being. You shall empower yourself also.

I'm going to say this now. You can email me at sameyou.org mediaclark@sameyou.org.

Ladies and gentlemen, tell me your stories. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much, guys.