Evangeline Lilly skipped a scheduled appearance at the Italian Global Series Festival (IGSF), despite being honored with a Maximo Excellence Award.
“Thank you, guys, so much for this incredible honor. I’m so deeply sad I can’t be there with you right now,” Lilly, 45, said in a recorded video when accepting the award on Monday, June 23. “Thank you to each and every one of you who has invested your time, passion, love and theories.”
The actress was being honored for her work as Kate Austen on Lost, which aired on ABC from 2004 to 2010.
Along with her missed appearance to accept the award, Lilly was also set to host a talk on Tuesday, June 24. The IGSF website announced that it had been “cancelled due to health reasons.”
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Both of Lilly’s missed appearances came nearly one month after experiencing an injury in Hawaii.
“I fainted at the beach,” she announced in a Substack blog post on May 30. “And fell face-first into a boulder.”
Lilly also shared photos of her injuries, which included scrapes on her nose and a bloody upper lip.
“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,” she wrote at the time. “I smiled wryly at them. ‘You won’t find anything,’ I said with a woozy voice. I have had ‘absent’ and fainting spells since I was a little girl.”
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Lilly continued: “The doctors checked me for epilepsy when I was young and then settled on the idea of hypoglycemia (without doing any testing). 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 did note that a series of tests ruled out hypoglycemia as an adult, so the reason for these “blackouts” has not been explained.
“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,” her blog post continued. “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.”
