Thomas Bamford
There is a huge air of mystery around what happens when we die.
Is there a heaven or hell, do we go into a bright light, or does life simply end?
There is a very small group of people who have come back from the brink of death, who were pronounced clinically dead before rushing back to life.
One of those people is Canadian nurse Julia Evans.
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Julie experienced a near-death experience (or NDE), ironically, as she was preparing for a shift as a nurse helping people to stay alive.
Many people who come back from having a NDE experience the transcendental, seeing visions or hallucinations, and some even have an out-of-body experience.
However, things were different for Julia. So just what exactly did she see when she 'died'?
A NDE is scientifically defined as when someone who has been considered 'clinically dead' comes back to life.
In conversation with podcaster Jeff Mara, Julia shared the day which changed her life forever.
It was a day like any other in 2018, as she bid farewell to her children and went running in her local gym. Julia then headed out to work at the hospital.
Julia noticed a scratching in her throat, which is usually a bad sign as she has severe allergies, particularly to lily flowers. She noticed there was a bunch at the nurses' station.
Usually, this would be a signal to leave, but for whatever reason, she felt a pull towards the lilies.
Her allergies to the flower are so serious that she became hypoxic, with her colleagues rushing to get rid of the flowers and to find her medication.
Unfortunately for Julia, when the physicians arrived to give her the medication she desperately needed - they gave her the wrong drug.
She said: "In that instant, everything in my world vanished, except for the physician, and we both locked eyes with each other, we both realized it was the wrong drug."
Julia had been given the wrong epinephrine, which should have been injected directly into her muscle instead of her veins where it was administered.
She continued: "Once he gave me that, I felt it was completely my last breath.
"There was this flash. And there was this play on being in this existence and being somewhere else. And I remember opening my mouth, and being a nurse I knew they were going to intubate me."
The medical team attending to Julia thought she must have been having a heart attack.
Julia added: "My heart, I know to this day, needed to explode – and that’s what it did."
She shared how she started feeling the symptoms of how her family members had died, recalling her mom who died of a brain aneurysm and her stepmother who died of a heart attack.
"Then that’s when they lost me. I went into something called pulseless VTAC, so I had no pulse. I hit such a frequency in my heart…when I say my heart exploded, I don’t mean like a grenade but there was so much medication that it just stopped. I went from blue to pale to grey, the colour of death and I was flaccid on the bed."
Julia described a place that was 'blacker than black' but wasn't hell. She describes the spot as blank consciousness, a void where nothing exists but the feeling that you're somewhere else.
Despite wanting to cry, Julia realised she had no eyes and only felt the pain in her heart.
She wasn't alone, and said her mom who died in 1983 was present, and said: "It's okay, honey. Mommy's here, don’t cry.
"I heard her like actually hearing her as if she was standing right beside me, I heard 'clear' and was back into this world, but I wasn’t fully back into this world."
Then she had an out-of-body experience, where she was hovering around 2ft from herself, as people around her were screaming for her to come back.
She then heard: ‘We lost her again’.
Julia said she was then immersed in a bright light that was full of so much color.
"There is no human word to describe it fully, the only way I know how to describe it was there was so much love within that moment that I was gifted the greatest gift and that's self-love.
"The light was so peaceful and felt like home and I could sense every single person that had passed and who passed away before me standing there… I could see their essence…and I was with everyone, like my mum and my best friends, and my dog and my aunts and all the people who have passed."
Following this, she was jolted back into her body again, where she saw a tunnel with a figure which was something like Jesus with long hair, but she did add it could have been the nurse who was working on her.
She said she asked herself: "Is that Jesus? Do I follow him? Is he going to save me? Do I instinctively go that way to salvation? Another part of me was like is that Buddha? Who is this, do I get to decide? Have I reached Nirvana?"
Julia added that she looked down and was completely naked, 'like a brand new baby' and that's when she took a breath.
She then returned to consciousness in the ICU, where all she could see was ‘a beautiful purity being.’
Strangely, Julia felt her mother's touch through the nurse, who also had the same name.
Julia continued: "I felt like I had this light, not just within me but surrounding me, and these beams of light was this awareness of all these other levels and all these other worlds, all these other things outside this conscious world we live. And I saw these rays...I could see the physical person in this realm, but I could also see their lineage; I could see what is connected to them"
In the moments after she awoke, Julia says she could see the 'lineage' of the nurses and doctors around her and everything that 'connected to them'.
What a wild ride!