Jamie Dornan had an experience with a caterpillar he won’t soon forget. While on a hiking trip in Portugal, the The Tourist actor and a friend started experiencing heart attack-like symptoms that landed both of them in the hospital.
According to Dornan’s hiking partner, Gordon Smart, the incident occurred last year in Portugal. While recording an episode of The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected podcast for the BBC, Smart said the two men thought they drank too much the night before until they started having very concerning symptoms.
Via Page Six:
Just one day into their vacation, Smart revealed that he felt a “tingling in his left hand and tickling in his left arm” that made him think it was “the sign of the start of a heart attack.”
“Now, I’m a fairly healthy guy but once you start thinking, you’re having a heart attack, you’re pretty sure that you’re convincing yourself that you are having one,” he said.
After Smart was taken away in an ambulance, Dornan started having the same symptoms.
“Jamie said, ‘Dear me. Gordon, about 20 minutes after you left, my left arm went numb, my left leg went numb, my right leg went numb, and I found myself in the back of an ambulance,’” Smart said.
At the hospital, doctors were able to determine that they had been exposed to processionary caterpillars, which have been plaguing golf courses in the area by “killing people’s dogs and giving men in their 40s heart attacks,” as relayed by Dornan.
Once the scare was over, the staff immediately jumped into celebrity fawning over Dornan.
“As he left the hospital, the paramedics asked them for a selfie,” Smart revealed. “Which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.”
(Via Page Six)