A Canadian nurse has shared an extraordinary account of her near-death experience, during which she claims her heart stopped and she relived the final moments of loved ones. Julia Evans described her ordeal as feeling like her “heart exploded” after a severe allergic reaction led to cardiac arrest in 2018.

Anaphylactic Shock and Medical Crisis

The incident began as Julia started her shift at a hospital. Despite knowing she had a sensitivity to lilies, she encountered a bouquet of the flowers. Inhaling their pollen triggered a rapid and severe anaphylactic reaction. Her throat began to constrict, making it increasingly difficult to breathe.

“It felt like sandpaper as I was swallowing,” Julia recounted in a previous interview. “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.”

As her condition worsened, she experienced a terrifying sensation of “drowning in air.” Medical staff recognized the severity of her anaphylactic shock. However, a critical error occurred when a doctor administered an epinephrine dose that was reportedly ten times more potent than intended, due to a mix-up with the medication.

This overdose sent her heart into overdrive, leading to cardiac arrest. “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,” Julia explained.

Reliving Others’ Deaths

During this critical phase, Julia reported experiencing a profound and disturbing phenomenon: she felt the physical sensations and emotional pain associated with the deaths of people close to her.

She described feeling the death of her best friend, who had died by suicide. “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.”

Simultaneously, she felt the passing of her stepmother, who had died years earlier in her arms from drowning and a 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,” Julia recalled. “I didn’t realise at the time it was their pain that I was feeling.”

It was at this point that medical records indicated she had no pulse, a state known as pulseless VTAC. “My heart exploded…there was so much medication that it just stopped,” she stated.

A Glimpse of the Other Side

Julia described her body becoming “flaccid” and her skin taking on a “colour of death” as her colleagues worked frantically to revive her. She reported that the nurses attending to her noted she had “went somewhere completely different.”

She detailed entering a strange realm where “your belief systems, your senses, your body are pixelated away.” In this disorienting space, she heard her biological mother speaking to her as if she were present. This was followed by an out-of-body experience, where she hovered above her own physical body, observing the resuscitation efforts.

“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’,” she said.

Return to Consciousness and Self-Love

After extensive life-saving interventions by her colleagues, Julia regained consciousness. Reflecting on the profound experience, she described an overwhelming sense of love and peace.

“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,” she stated. “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.”

It took years for Julia to fully process the traumatic yet transformative event. The anniversary of the incident served as a poignant reminder of her journey. “The anniversary made me realise that I actually went and saw the light and I felt my mum, and I actually experienced this,” she said.

In a moment of dark humor following her return from the brink, Julia reportedly quipped to her colleagues, “Well, I think I’m going to take the day off.”