‘I died when heart exploded and no human word can describe what I then saw’

Julia Evans was at work in a hospital in Canada when she suddenly went into anaphylactic shock after inhaling lily pollen – and what happened next was beyond belief

A nurse had a harrowing brush with death, triggered by merely inhaling pollen from a bouquet of flowers. Canadian Julia Evans recounted her near-death experience, describing a peaceful state where she met the spirits of long-deceased relatives and friends as medical professionals fought to save her life.

In a conversation with podcaster Jeff Mara, Julia detailed the onset of her extraordinary ordeal. She had just arrived at the hospital where she worked when she began to feel an uncomfortable “scratchiness” in her throat.

Julia described how she quickly tried to diagnose her symptoms, saying: “You go through very rapidly in your head; ‘Did I come in contact with something? Did I eat something funny? Do I have a cold?’”

She continued: “You kind of scan your environment…and as I quickly scan I can start feeling my throat getting tighter and tighter. It felt like sandpaper as I was swallowing And so as I scanned my environment I looked straight ahead of me, and at the nursing station there was this beautiful bouquet of lilies.”

Although aware of her allergy to lilies, Julia didn’t consider it severe and would typically steer clear of them. However, on that fateful morning in 2018, she inexplicably approached the flowers, setting off a severe and potentially lethal allergic reaction: “At that point, I was already starting to turn blue,” she said.

Julia said that if you have to suffer anaphylactic shock, a hospital is likely the safest place to be. Her colleagues sprang into action; one dashed off to fetch medication, another rang Julia’s husband, while a third stayed by her side in an attempt to soothe her.

She went on: “It was just her and I sitting in the the staff room together, and she was staring at me, paralysed, watching me die in front of her … all I kept thinking was ‘I’m drowning in air’.”

Shortly after, a doctor burst into the room. Julia recalled: “He saw the state of me. He saw the colour of me. He saw the desperation through my eyes.”

The doctor administered an emergency injection of epinephrine – the primary component of EpiPens – but an unexpected mistake escalated a critical situation into a lethal one. “We both locked eyes with each other and in that instant, we both realised it was the wrong drug,” Julia clarified.

The concentration of epinephrine in the syringe was ten times higher than the doctor had prescribed – causing Julia’s heart to race uncontrollably.

Even amidst the unfolding crisis, a part of Julia was still striving to manage the medical emergency within her own body. She added: “All of a sudden I was just like The Hulk… that was the epinephrine that was surging through my body, I started breathing And I remember just pushing everything away.”

Recognising she was suffering cardiac arrest, Julia hurled her safety glasses, keys and lanyard across the room and screamed: “Rip off my clothes. Get leads on me, get pads on me right now!”

In that desperate moment, wracked with agony, Julia’s mind suddenly drifted to loved ones who had passed away. She recalled: “I started feeling how my best friend had died because she had shot herself, and it felt like the back of my head had blown away.

“I felt what she had gone through and I was letting that go. And then that was the same day that my stepmother years prior had died in my arms in Mexico. She had drowned and had a massive heart attack.”

She went on: “So then I got to feel her, and at the same point I also got to feel where my biological mother died in 1983 from a brain aneurysm and it was that feeling, and I could feel them, and like that moment of I’m going down. I didn’t realise at the time it was their pain that I was feeling.”

Yet at the same time as Julia’s thoughts were spiralling, her body had shut down completely. “That’s when they lost me,” she revealed.

“I went into it’s called pulseless VTAC. I had no pulse. I had hit such a frequency within my heart that my heart exploded …there was so much medication that it just stopped and so when my heart went and they started working on me, [my skin] went from blue, to pale, to the grey, the colour of death, and I was flaccid on the bed.”

In that moment, Julia said she “went somewhere completely different.”

She described entering a total black void where “everything – your belief systems your senses your body are pixelated away.”

Julia’s anxieties were quickly soothed, however. She remembered: “I distinctly hear my mother who had died in 1983 saying, ‘It’s okay Honey. Mommy’s here, don’t cry’. And so as I heard her, like actually hearing her as if she was standing right beside me…”

As moments felt frozen in time, Julia witnessed her medical team fighting desperately to preserve her life. She continued: “I was hovering over my body and I was probably two feet over my body. I could feel them working on me and I was screaming in my mind ‘I would come back if I could.’”.

Then she heard the haunting declaration: “We lost her again.”

In that instant, she said “everything else changed” as Julia discovered herself surrounded by extraordinary light and vibrant hues, explaining: “And now I’m experiencing everything, but there’s no human word completely and fully. And the only way I know how to describe it is there was so much love within that moment that I was gifted the greatest gift and that’s that self-love.

“This light was just so peaceful, and it felt like home. I could sense every single person that had passed away before me standing there.”

Julia felt a fleeting moment of tranquillity and enlightenment, before being abruptly thrust back to harsh reality.

She went on: “I felt ‘Wham!’ and this time I felt totally thrown back into my body… I hit so hard.”

Following a spell of bewilderment, during which Julia couldn’t tell if she was looking at a long-haired hospital junior or Jesus, she came to the realisation that she had survived: “I instinctively looked down and when I looked down I noticed that I was completely naked, like a brand new baby.

“I said ‘Who cut my favourite blue bra?’”.

She describes it as a deeply distressing ordeal, explaining it took her several months to come to terms with what had happened.

She added: “It was a year after my near-death experience… the anniversary made me realise that I actually went and saw the light and I felt my mum, and I actually experienced this.”

Julia reveals that her harrowing brush with death prompted her to completely reassess her existence, leaving her with newfound psychic abilities that enable her to peer into people’s souls.