Actor Jamie Dornan was hospitalized with coronary heart attack-like signs after an encounter with a poisonous caterpillar, in line with good friend Gordon Smart.
During an look on BBC’s “The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected” radio present, the Scottish broadcaster defined how each males ended up with racing hearts and arm discomfort throughout a golf journey to Portugal final 12 months.
After an evening of ingesting with the boys, Smart mentioned he started feeling a “tingling in my left hand and tingling in my left arm,” signs that are “normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.”
He was taken to a neighborhood medical heart, the place medical doctors informed Smart he had a coronary heart price of 210 BPM and despatched him to the hospital. Only later, Smart discovered that Dornan had additionally checked into the hospital after coming down with the identical signs.
While medical doctors initially blamed the well being scare on an excessive amount of caffeine and alcohol throughout their getaway, every week after the incident, Smart mentioned he acquired a “phone call from the doctor” who requested if the group got here into contact with any caterpillars whereas on trip.
It was then that they discovered they probably brushed as much as a processionary caterpillar on the golf course.
“It turns out that there are caterpillars on golf courses in the south of Portugal that have been killing people’s dogs and giving men in their 40s heart attacks,” Smart mentioned.
Processionary caterpillars have tiny hairs containing a poisonous protein that may set off itching, rashes, eye irritation, sore throat, and problem inhaling each people and animals, in line with a web page from the entomology division on the University of Florida.
“It turns out we brushed up againt processionary caterpillars and had been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” Smart added.
“So there’s my story. The good news is it wasn’t a caffeine overdose, it wasn’t a hangover. It was a poisonous, toxic caterpillar,” he concluded.
