Nurse who died and then came back to life reveals what she saw after her 'heart exploded'
A nurse who had 'no pulse' after a life-threatening allergic reaction has revealed the bizarre experience she had while medics fought to save her.
Julia Evans ended up becoming a patient after clocking on for her shift at a Canadian hospital in 2018 thanks to a 'beautiful bouquet of lilies' being in her vicinity.
She explained that although she knew she was allergic to the flowers, she didn't realise just how severe it was - until she 'started to turn blue' after getting close to them.
Julia recalled how she noticed that her throat felt 'scratchy' after arriving at the hospital, before realising it was 'getting tighter and tighter', which are telltale signs of an allergic reaction.
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"It felt like sandpaper as I was swallowing," she told podcaster Jeff Mara during a previous sit down.
"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."
Despite this, she decided to approach the flowers and subsequently breathed in the pollen, which triggered an almost fatal allergic reaction that sent her into anaphylactic shock.
Her colleagues quickly rushed to her aid and she recalled how one of her fellow nurses simply 'stared' at her, as she was 'paralysed watching me die in front of her'.
"All I kept thinking was, 'I'm drowning in air'," Julia continued. "[A doctor] saw the state of me. He saw the colour of me. He saw the desperation through my eyes."
This medic then gave her an injection of epinephrine, the main ingredient in EpiPens. However, the pair then made the horror realisation that he had administered 'the wrong drug'.
According to Julia, the epinephrine was ten times more potent than the dose that the doctor had intended to give her and this sent her heart into overdrive.
She explained: "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."
The nurse realised she was going into cardiac arrest and recalled how she ordered hospital staff to 'rip her clothes off and get pads on her' right now.
'That's when they lost me'
While she was experiencing all of these physical sensations, Julia was dealing with some psychological ones too - as she claims she began to 'feel' how people close to her had previously passed away.
"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," Julia said. "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.
"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. I didn't realise at the time it was their pain that I was feeling.
"That's when they lost me. I went into it's called pulseless VTAC. I had no pulse. My heart exploded ...there was so much medication that it just stopped."
She explained her body went 'flaccid' and her skin was 'the colour of death'. At this point, the nurse claims she 'went somewhere completely different'.
Julia said that she was in a strange realm where 'your belief systems, your senses, your body are pixelated away'. She claims she then heard her biological mother speak to her 'as if she was standing right beside me'.
To make things even more peculiar, the health worker said she then 'hovered over her body', adding: "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'."
As her colleagues continued their life-saving efforts, she suddenly regained consciousness.
Reflecting upon her near-death experience and how it 'changed' her, Julia said: "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."
She only come to terms with what supposedly happened to her after a year, as she added: "The anniversary made me realise that I actually went and saw the light and I felt my mum, and I actually experienced this."
Comically, she told her colleagues after coming back round: "Well, I think I'm going to take the day off."
Olivia Burke