Jamie Dornan Hospitalized With ‘Heart Attack Symptoms’ Due to Caterpillar

Jamie Dornan’s unexpected encounter with toxic caterpillars landed the Fifty Shades of Grey star in the hospital. The actor’s friend, broadcaster Gordon Smart, opened up about how their golf trip to Portugal last year ended in them both going to the hospital after experiencing concerning symptoms during a recent episode of the BBC’s The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected podcast. 

While Smart said he and Dornan initially thought they didn’t feel well after having a few too many drinks the night before, it turns out their symptoms were caused by pine processionary moth caterpillars, whose tiny hairs can convey an irritating poison that can cause rashes, eye irritation and allergic reactions in humans. Smart revealed that he began feeling “tingling in his left hand and tickling in his left arm” just one day into their vacation, which he feared was 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 on the podcast. After going to the hospital, Smart was observed and discharged, returning to his hotel to see Dornan also hooked up to medical equipment. “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 recalled, adding, “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.”

A week later, Smart got a call from his doctor, who revealed that the symptoms he and his friend had experienced could have been due to contact with the 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,” he revealed, adding, “It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive.” Smart joked, “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.”