Jamie Dornan Encountered a Toxic Caterpillar That Hospitalized Him & His Friends

Jamie Dornan had a scary and unexpected encounter in Portugal last year.

Gordon Smart, a Scottish broadcaster, opened up on BBC’s The Good, the Bad and the Unexpectedabout the incident, which happened when he, Jamie and friends from Northern Ireland went on a golf trip.

Gordon explained that after a night of drinking wine and espresso martinis, he started to feel “tingling in my left hand and tingling in my left arm,” which he figured was “normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.”

He was taken to a local hospital, and his heart rate was 210 BPM. Before he got there, he collapsed in an Uber, woke up in a hospital bed and explained to a doctor how much alcohol he had the night before.

“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. And I thought, ‘That’s not a good sign that he’s in the same state as me.’”

After leaving the hospital and returning to their place, the broadcaster soon realized that his friend 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.’”

Gordon said he received a “phone call from the doctor” a week after their golfing trip asking him if the group had come in contact with caterpillars on the golf course, before sending him a local news story about processionary caterpillars.

Pine processionary moth caterpillars have thousands of tiny hairs featuring an “urticating, or irritating, protein called thaumetopoei,” which can lead to rashes, pain in the skin, eyes and throat and in rarer cases, allergic reactions. The moths, however, are “harmless” to both people and animals, via Forest Research.

“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 again processionary caterpillars and had been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” he revealed.

“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.”

Jamie also revealed a stalker-like situation that happened because of Fifty Shades of Grey.