Jamie Dornan’s fans were left heartbroken after the actor was rushed to hospital with ‘heart attack symptoms’.
His friend, Gordon Smart, said that the 41-year-old touched a poisonous caterpillar while they were in Portugal.
Smart, who was also hospitalized with the same symptoms, said that they had been both in contact with processionary caterpillars.
Speaking on the BBC’s The Good, The Bad, and The Unexpected podcast, Smart said that only one day into their trip, he had started to feel a ‘tingling in his left hand and tickling in his left arm.”
He then decided to seek medical attention in case 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 added.
After further tests, Smart was finally discharged but he saw Dornan laying in other bed.
“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,” he recalled.
Smart also revealed that as Dornan left the hospital, paramedics asked for a photo, “which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.”
A week later, Smart received a call from the doctor informing him that he and his friend had likely been suffering the symptoms because of exposure to the poisonous caterpillars.
“And 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.
“It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive.”
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