For many people, the worst that can happen from smelling flowers is an allergic reaction. But for one nurse, it turned into a near-death experience unlike any other.
Julia Evans had inhaled pollen from a bouquet of flowers but had no idea it would lead to her dramatic ordeal. The Canadian nurse described how, while medical staff fought to preserve her life, she experienced a peaceful state where she met relatives and friends who had passed away years earlier. Speaking to podcaster Jeff Mara, she explained how the extraordinary experience begun.
Julia had just reached the hospital where she was employed when she began feeling “scratchy” in her throat. She described how she started attempting to determine what was amiss, remembering: “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?’
“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 that she was aware of her lily allergy, but hadn’t considered it particularly serious and would simply steer clear of them when spotted.
However, for some unknown reason, on that fateful morning in 2018, Julia chose to approach the flowers – sparking a massive and potentially-fatal allergic reaction. “At that point, I was already starting to turn blue,” she said.
Julia expressed that if one is to go into anaphylactic shock, a hospital is likely the best place to be. Her colleagues immediately sprang into action – one dashed off to fetch medication, another rang Julia’s husband, and a third stayed with her in an attempt to keep her calm, reports the Mirror UK.
“It was just her and I sitting in the the staff room together,” Julia recalled. “And she was staring at me, paralyzed 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. “He saw the state of me,” Julia said. “He saw the color of me. He saw the desperation through my eyes.”
The doctor administered an emergency injection of epinephrine – the primary ingredient of EpiPens – but an unexpected mistake escalated a serious situation into a lethal one.
Julia explained: “We both locked eyes with each other and in that instant we both realized it was the wrong drug.”
The concentration of epinephrine that had been loaded into the syringe was 10 times higher than the doctor realized, causing Julia’s heart to race uncontrollably.
Even amid the unfolding crisis, a part of Julia was still attempting to manage the medical emergency happening within her own body.
“All of a sudden I was just like The Hulk…” she said. “That was the epinephrine that was surging through my body. I started breathing and I remember just pushing everything away.”
Realising she was going into cardiac arrest, Julia threw her safety glasses, keys and lanyard across the room and yelled: “Rip off my clothes. Get leads on me get pads on me right now!”
In that critical moment, and in excruciating pain, Julia’s thoughts suddenly turned to people in her life that had died. She said: “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.
“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 realize at the time it was their pain that I was feeling.”
But while Julia’s mind was racing, her body had shut down. “That’s when they lost me,” she explained. “I went into it’s called pulseless VTACH [ventricular tachycardia]. 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 color of death and I was flaccid on the bed.”
In that moment, Julia said she “went somewhere completely different.” She described it as a complete black void where “everything – your belief systems your senses your body are pixelated away.”
However, Julia’s fears were soon soothed. She remembered: “I distinctly hear my mother who had died in 1983 saying ‘It’s OK, 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 seemed to freeze, Julia had a vision of the rest of her team frantically trying to save 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 chilling words: “We lost her again.”
At that point, she said “everything else changed.” Julia found herself in a place of incredible light and rich color, 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 peace and clarity for a moment, before being suddenly yanked back into 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 looking at a long-haired hospital junior or Jesus, she recognized 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,” she remembered. “I said ‘Who cut my favorite blue bra?'”
It proved to be a distressing ordeal, she explained, and it required several months for her to come to terms with it.
“It was a year after my near-death experience… the anniversary made me realize that I actually went and saw the light, and I felt my mum and I actually experienced this,” she said.
Julia revealed that she entirely reassessed her life following her startling encounter, and has been left with a fresh psychic sensitivity that enables her to glimpse into other people’s souls.