Evangeline Lilly showed fans the bloody injuries she sustained after fainting at the beach.
The Ant-Man actor published an essay on her Substack account on Friday, where she revealed that she fainted and hit her face on a boulder.
“I fainted at the beach. And fell face first into a boulder,” she wrote. “At the hospital, the nurses and doctor went straight into action, more determined to find the cause of my blackout than to stitch up the hole punctured into my face by the rock. I smiled wryly at them. ‘You won’t find anything.’ I said with a woozy voice.”
The Lost actor included photos of her face, which had stitches between her nose and her lip, with a few shallower cuts on her chin.
Lilly explained in her Substack post that she’s experienced “fainting spells” since she was a child, and was diagnosed with hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). “For a good chunk of my life, I went with that — hypoglycemia. It added up — my metabolism is through the roof and I metabolize sugars, particularly, with shocking efficiency,” she said.
“But, as I got older, and other health issues started to enter the picture, my doctor started doing a LOT of blood work. What was interesting was how, even after a 12-hour fast, even after blacking out, my glucose levels never came back as low. Hypoglycemia, it seemed, was being ruled out.”
As she reflected on her fainting spells in the essay, the Real Steel actor discovered there might be an introspective reason for her fainting. “I have come to believe that this ‘checking out’ is a result of my little soul reaching her limit of what she feels she can cope with in this life, and she ‘leaves the building,’ so to speak,” she wrote.
“It is my conclusion, after enough of these episodes and enough medical testing to rule out different factors, that my soul longs to return,” she continued. “That when she has had enough, when the pain becomes too great, the stresses beyond overwhelming, the shattered idealism crushing, my soul exits my body and returns to pure spirit.”
Lilly said that there was also a benefit to her accident. She wrote that the last few months had been “demanding” for her, and the injury forced her to “drop everything.”
“It might seem crazy looking at my face and my busted tooth, but I feel so grateful that I blacked out,” her essay read. “I needed the reset.”
