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The Canadian actress and ‘Lost’ star blacked out on a beach in Hawaii last May and smashed her face open on a rock.
Published Jan 03, 2026 • Last updated 3 hours ago • 3 minute read
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Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly attends the “Ant-Man and The Wasp Quantumania” world premiere at Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, Calif., Feb. 6, 2023. Photo by Jesse Grant /Getty ImagesArticle content
Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly shared a health update to begin the new year, but the news wasn’t positive.
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The Lost star revealed she suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) after blacking out on a beach in Hawaii last May and smashing her face open on a rock.
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Lilly, 46, said a lot of her fans had asked how she was doing and wanted to know her test results for the brain scans.
“It’s late on January 1, the first day of 2026, and I’m entering into this new year — the year of the horse — with some bad news about my concussion,” she said in an Instagram video shared Friday.
“The results came back from the scans, and almost every area of my brain is functioning at a decreased capacity. So, I do have brain damage from the TBI and possibly other factors going on.”
Lilly said the job now is to get to the bottom of the diagnosis with her doctors and do the hard work on healing fully from the brain injury.
“Which I don’t look forward to because I feel like hard work is all I do,” she chuckled. “But that’s OK.”
She said her cognitive decline following the injury has helped slow down her life and have a more restful end of the year, noting that the Christmas holiday was the most calmest since having children 14 years ago.
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“(I’m) feeling extraordinarily grateful and blessed to be able to play one more day, one more year, on this beautiful living planet.”
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In July, Lilly said she had dental surgery and saw a brain specialist in Hawaii.
However, the actress had been seeking answers for months to explain issues her cognitive decline.
“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 captioned the video.
Lilly revealed her brain injury May 30 on Instagram and wrote in detail on her Substack page about fainting spells she first began experiencing as a child and which continued into adulthood.
Canadian actress Evangeline Lilly shared these images of her face after she fainted and blacked out on a beach in Hawaii last May. Photo by Evangeline Lilly /Instagram
Her doctor believed it was hypoglycemia after ruling out epilepsy.
Other health issues came up and her physician began doing more blood work. Hypoglycemia was then ruled out.
“What was making me become so cognitively checked out that the doctors thought I might have epilepsy as a child?” she wrote. “What was causing me to faint periodically throughout my adult life?”
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Lilly said a nurse at the hospital where she was being treated for her facial injury told her that most patients who faint and black out are never given a medical diagnosis and “live in the mystery of not knowing.”
However, Lilly says she has a spiritual answer to explain her lifelong health struggles.
“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. Or ‘leaves the meat suit’ might be a better way of putting it.”
She also said the fainting spells are her brain’s way of telling her to slow down.
“It is my conclusion, after enough of these episodes and enough medical testing to rule out different factors, that my soul longs to return. 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.”
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