Nurse who died when ‘heart exploded’ says ‘no human word can describe what I saw’

Canadian nurse Julia Evans suffered a near-fatal allergic reaction to lilies at the hospital where she worked, going into cardiac arrest

Simply breathing in pollen from a floral arrangement triggered a life-threatening ordeal for one nurse. Julia Evans, from Canada, described how medical staff fought to save her while she drifted into a peaceful realm where she was reunited with deceased loved ones from her past.

During an interview with podcaster Jeff Mara, she recounted how the extraordinary episode unfolded. She had just reached the hospital where she was employed when her throat began to feel “scratchy”.

She explained her thought process as she tried to identify the problem, 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?'” It comes as another person claimed to see his own future during his near-death experience.

“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.”

Julia revealed she was aware of her lily allergy but hadn’t considered it particularly dangerous, typically just steering clear of the blooms when she spotted them.

Yet on that ill-fated morning in 2018, Julia inexplicably chose to approach the flowers – sparking a severe and life-threatening allergic response. “At that point, I was already starting to turn blue,” she revealed.

Julia remarked that, if you’re going to experience anaphylactic shock, a hospital is likely the ideal location to be.

Her colleagues sprang into action; one dashed to fetch some medication, one rang Julia’s husband, and another remained with her to attempt to keep her composed.

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’.”

Moments afterwards, a doctor burst into the room.

“He saw the state of me,” Julia said. “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 transformed a grave situation into a fatal one.

“We both locked eyes with each other and in that instant we both realised it was the wrong drug,” Julia explained.

The concentration of epinephrine that had been prepared in the syringe was ten times stronger than the doctor understood – sending Julia’s heart into overdrive.

Even as the crisis developed, part of Julia was still attempting to manage the medical emergency erupting within her own body.

She continued: “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 experiencing cardiac arrest, Julia hurled her safety glasses, keys and lanyard across the room and shouted: “Rip off my clothes. Get leads on me get pads on me right now!”

In that dire moment, while enduring excruciating pain, Julia’s mind suddenly drifted to loved ones in her life 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.”

However, while Julia’s thoughts were racing, 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”. It was a total black emptiness, she described, where “everything – your belief systems your senses your body are pixelated away”.

Julia’s anxieties were quickly soothed though. 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 time appeared to freeze, Julia experienced a vision of her remaining colleagues frantically attempting to rescue 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’.”

And then she heard the terrifying words: “We lost her again.”

At that instant, she said “everything else changed” Julia discovered herself in a realm of extraordinary brightness and vibrant hues, adding: “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 experienced this moment of tranquillity and understanding briefly, before being abruptly dragged back to reality.

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

Following a period of bewilderment, where Julia wasn’t certain whether she was observing a long-haired hospital junior or Jesus, she recognised that she was alive: “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?'”.

It was a distressing ordeal, she explains, and it required her several months to come to terms with it.

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 I actually experienced this.”

Julia says that she completely reassessed her existence following her startling encounter, and has been left with a new psychic sensitivity that enables her to peer into other people’s souls.