Jamie Dornan arrives at the 28th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Barker Hangar on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022, in Santa Monica,
(TMX) – Jamie Dornan was hospitalized last year after exposure to “toxic” caterpillars in Portugal left him with symptoms similar to a heart attack, his friend recently revealed.
Scottish broadcaster Gordon Smart, a friend of Dornan, shared the anecdote during an appearance earlier this month on the BBC’s “The Good, The Bad and the Unexpected.” Smart said he and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” actor were hospitalized last year while on a golf trip in Portugal with a few friends from Northern Ireland.
The friends all spent an evening drinking wine and espresso martinis, after which Smart said he started to feel “tingling in my left hand and tingling in my left arm,” which he thought was “normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.”
Smart said he collapsed in an Uber and was taken to the hospital, where his heart rate was recorded at an incredibly high 210 beats per minute. He awoke in a hospital bed, and revealed to doctors how much he had to drink the night before, still believing that may have been a factor.
“As I was lying there, one of the other lads I was with went past on a hospital bed with doctors shouting the same questions to him,” Smart said. “And I thought, ‘That’s not a good sign that he’s in the same state as me.’”
Smart was released from the hospital, while Dornan was still there.
“There [Dornan] was with all this stuff attached to this chair saying, ‘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 recalled.
A week after their trip, Smart said he received a “phone call from the doctor” asking whether they had come into contact with any caterpillars while golfing. The doctor sent him a news story about pine processionary moth caterpillars wreaking havoc in the country.
“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 brushed up against processionary caterpillars and had been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” Smart said.
According to Forest Research, the research arm of the U.K.’s Forestry Commission, pine processionary moth larvae, or caterpillars, have thousands of tiny hairs that contain an urticating, or irritating, protein called thaumetopoein. When the hairs come into contact with people or animals, “they can cause painful skin, eye and throat irritations and rashes and, in rare cases, allergic reactions.”
“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,” Smart said.
