Jamie Dornan, the actor who played the role of Christian Grey in the Hollywood movie ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ was recently hospitalised after he suffered heart attack symptoms on a trip to Portugal in 2023. The symptoms were caused by pine processionary caterpillars, which are toxic. This was revealed by his friend Gordon Smart, who was also in the hospital after experiencing similar symptoms.
In a podcast on BBC’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected,” the Scottish presenter described how both men had arm pain and racing hearts after playing golf in Portugal last year. They thought it was due to having many drinks the night before. Mr Smart said, “We had a great time the first day, played loads of golf, went out, lots of wine was drunk and then we got on to espresso martinis.” However, the next day they were “absolutely dreadful”.
Mr Smart said he started feeling a “tingling in my left hand and tingling in my left arm,” symptoms which are “normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.” He added, “I’m the son of a GP (doctor) and thought, ‘This is normally 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.” The doctors found his resting heart rate extremely high when he checked in to the hospital.
Once he was discharged and returned to the hotel, he saw Mr Dornan hooked up to medical equipment. Mr Smart said on the podcast, “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.”
“Anyway, as he left the hospital, the paramedics asked them for a selfie, which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room,” he added.
Mr Smart said that a week later, he received a call from the doctor who said that their symptoms might have been caused by toxic 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” he shared.
“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,” Mr Smart added.
According to the University of Florida’s entomology department, processionary caterpillars have microscopic hairs that carry a poisonous protein that can cause itching, rashes, eye irritation, sore throats, and breathing difficulties in both people and animals.
