Months after sharing that she fell face-first into a boulder, Evangeline Lilly revealed she also suffered brain damage in the incident.
“Verdict’s in… I do have brain damage from my (traumatic brain injury). Comforting to know my cognitive decline isn’t just peri-menopause, discomforting to know what an uphill battle it will be to try to reverse the deficiencies,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Friday.
“Thank you all for always asking, for always caring, and for your continued prayers 
” she added.
In an accompanying video, the “Hobbit” actress, 46, said she’s “entering into this new year, the year of the horse, with some bad news about my concussion.”
Lilly informed followers that scan results showed “almost every area in [her] brain is functioning at a decreased capacity.”
“I do have brain damage from the TBI and possibly other factors going on,” she added.
The “Ant-Man and the Wasp” star said her job is now “to hit the bottom of that with the doctors and then embark on the hard work of fixing it, which I don’t look forward to because I feel like hard work is all I do. But that’s okay.”
The “Lost” actress — who announced her retirement from acting in June 2024 — showed off the bloody injuries she sustained after fainting on a rocky beach in May.
“I fainted at the beach. And fell face first into a boulder,” she wrote in a Substack essay at the time, including photos of her bruised and lacerated nose, mouth, and chin.
The actress also appeared to have dislodged a front tooth in the graphic photos.
After recalling that she “blacked out again” on the way to the hospital, Lilly wrote that medical staff at the facility “went straight into action” but were “more determined to find the cause of [her] blackout than to stitch up the hole punctured into [her] face by the rock.”
“You won’t find anything,” she recounted telling them in a “woozy” voice.
“I have had ‘absent’ and fainting spells since I was a little girl,” she continued in the essay. “The doctors checked me for epilepsy when I was young and then settled on the idea of hypoglycemia (without doing any testing).”
However, as she “got older, and other health issues started to enter the picture,” she felt hypoglycemia didn’t make sense.
Ultimately, she reached the “conclusion” that her “soul longs to return. That when she has had enough, when the pain becomes too great, the stresses beyond overwhelming, the shattered idealism crushing, [her] soul exits [her] body and returns to pure spirit.”
Lilly wrote that she is “not the only person who has blackout episodes that are not explained.”
“The nurse who was tending [to] me in the hospital told me that most patients with this issue are never given a medical answer as to why they blackout [sic],” she explained.
“Not with heart monitors, glucose monitors nor blood tests. They just have to live in the mystery of not knowing.”
Lilly called her “unmedical” diagnosis “a beautiful invitation” to explore the possibility that there is “more to be felt in the not knowing.”
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