A nurse whose heart exploded due to a freak allergy has recalled her eerie near death experience (NDE).
While Julia Evans isn't the first person to have an NDE, hers happened in the most bizarre of circumstances.
Earlier this year, the Canadian medic opened up to podcaster Jeff Mara about how her allergy to lilies was more severe than she initially thought.
On one morning in 2018, Julia was stood near the bouquet of flowers and started to breathe in the pollen. “At that point, I was already starting to turn blue,” she said.
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It triggered an almost fatal reaction as she went into anaphylactic shock, which is a life-threatening allergic reaction after being exposed to an allergen.
Her colleagues at the hospital rushed her into the staff room where a doctor gave her an injection of epinephrine, the main ingredient in EpiPens.
”We both locked eyes with each other and in that instant we both realised it was the wrong drug,” Julia revealed.
After her heart went 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.
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”And I remember just pushing everything away.”
Realising she was going into cardiac arrest, Julia 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."
"That's when they lost me," she added. "I went into it's called pulseless VTAC. I had no pulse.
“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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Julia then heard her mother who had died in 1983 say, ‘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," she said.
The nurse then heard: "We lost her again," and then in that moment she experienced 'everything, 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,” Julia recalled.
“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."
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She was suddenly brought back to life and felt like she'd been 'thrown back into my body'.
“I instinctively looked down and when I looked down I noticed that I was completely naked, like a brand new baby,“ Julia said.
“I said ‘Who cut my favourite blue bra?’"
Then she heard hospital staff say 'she's back', before looking down to see her body was in fact covered in 'all these little pads and all these little cords' rather than the 'sheer beautiful naked purity of myself' she'd previously seen.
After this, a nurse who'd helped save her, Cheryl, 'metamorphosised' into her mother, who was also called Cheryl.
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Eventually she realised what had happened to her, joking: "Well, I think I'm going to take the day off."
Topics: Health
Anish Vij