Nurse who 'died' when heart exploded says 'no human word' can describe what she saw

Daily Mirror

07-08-2025

A freak allergy attack led to a surreal near-death experience for nurse Julia Evans, and she passed into an otherworldly realm where she saw long-dead friends and relatives and, briefly, 'Jesus'
Simply breathing in the pollen from a bunch of flowers led to a dramatic near-death experience for a nurse. Canadian Julia Evans recalled how, as medics scrambled to save her life, she found herself in a serene state where she encountered relatives and friends who had died years before.
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Speaking to podcaster Jeff Mara, she told how the amazing experience had begun. She had just arrived at the hospital where she worked on, when she started feeling 'scratchy' in her throat.
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She described how she started trying to work out what was wrong, recalling: "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?'
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'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 explained that she knew she had an allergy to lilies, but didn't think it was particularly severe and would just avoid them whenever she saw any.
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But for some reason, on that fateful morning in 2018, Julia decided to walk towards the flowers – triggering a massive and potentially-fatal allergic reaction. 'At that point, I was already starting to turn blue,' she said.
Julia said that, if you're going to go into anaphylactic shock, a hospital is probably the best place to be. Her colleagues rushed into action; one raced to get some medication, one telephoned Julia's husband, and another sat with her to try to keep her calm.
She continued: "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'.'
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Moments later, a doctor rushed 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 gave her an emergency injection of epinephrine – the main ingredient of EpiPens – but an unforeseen error turned a serious situation into a deadly 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 loaded into the syringe was ten times higher than the doctor realised – sending Julia's heart into overdrive.
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Even as the crisis unfolded, a part of Julia was still trying to control the medical emergency erupting in 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.'
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!'
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In that critical situation, and in extreme 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."
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She continued: '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.'
But while Julia's mind was racing, her body had closed down. 'That's when they lost me," she explained. "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.'
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In that instant, Julia said she 'went somewhere completely different.' It was a complete black void, she explained, where 'everything – your belief systems your senses your body are pixelated away.'
Julia's fears were soon calmed though. She recalled: '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.'
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As time seemed to stand still, Julia had a vision of the rest of her team desperately trying to save her life. She went on: '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 chilling words: "We lost her again.'
At that moment, she said 'everything else changed' Julia found herself in a place of incredible light and rich colour, 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.
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'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.'
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After a moment of confusion, where Julia wasn't sure whether she was seeing a long-haired hospital junior or Jesus, she realised 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 traumatising experience, she says and it took her several months to process 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 re-evaluated her life after her shocking experience, and has been left with a new psychic awareness that allows her to see into other people's souls.