Earlier this year, BBC broadcaster Gordon Smart recalled a creepy and frightening incident involving his friend, actor Jamie Dornan.
On the Jan. 12 episode of BBC Radio Scotland’s “The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected” podcast, Smart revealed that on a March 2023 golfing trip to Portugal, he began to feel heart attack symptoms, which he attributed to too many espresso martinis, according to People magazine.
Oddly, however, when he returned from the hospital, the 43-year-old broadcaster learned that Dornan, 41, had experienced the same symptoms.
A native of Northern Ireland, Dornan starred in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy of erotic romance films.
Smart, meanwhile, described himself as having kept in decent physical shape.
“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 broadcaster said according to Page Six.
Clearly, therefore, the apparent coincidence of heart attack-related symptoms simultaneously affecting two healthy friends in their early 40s, one of them a fit actor, required an explanation.
On the podcast, Smart described what happened to him and how he discovered the likely culprit.
First, he recalled feeling “tingling in my left hand, then tingling in my left arm,” symptoms he viewed as “normally the sign of the start of a heart attack.”
Have you ever had an encounter with a toxic insect?
After passing out in an Uber, he awakened to find himself in a hospital bed. Convinced that he had consumed too much caffeine, he told the doctor about the espresso martinis.
Then, upon discharge, Smart left the hospital and returned to the golfing resort, where he saw Dornan “with all this stuff attached to his chest, saying, ‘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.’”
People magazine cited a “source close to Dornan” as saying that the actor never actually went to the hospital. But the source did not refute Smart’s account of his friend’s similar symptoms.
Either way, the cause of those symptoms remained a mystery.
Then came the creepy part.
A week after the golf trip ended, the doctor from the hospital called Smart to ask if he had encountered any caterpillars on the golf course.
Yes, 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 brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and had been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” Smart said.
Readers may hear Smart’s account in the following video posted to YouTube by E! News.
According to Terrence D. Fitzgerald, distinguished professor of biological sciences at SUNY Cortland, the “pine processionary caterpillar” rates as the “best known of all the processionaries.”
Native to southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa, the insect has a formidable anti-predator defense. Humans, therefore, should take care to avoid them at all costs.
“Contact with the hairs causes skin rashes and eye irritations. Susceptible individuals may also develop an allergic response to a protein associated with the hairs of the caterpillar,” Fitzgerald wrote.
Australian Geographic, in fact, used much more alarming language to describe all types of processionary caterpillars.
For instance, any one of the “millions of long fine, needle-like hairs that cover each caterpillar” can cause blindness if they get into the eyes.
Furthermore, “pregnant horses that mistakenly eat these caterpillars when they’re on grass, will spontaneously abort their unborn foals.”
In other words, it appears Smart and Dornan got lucky.
It is a remarkable and unsettling thing that so many of our most dangerous adversaries are either microscopic or too small to appear threatening.
Perhaps God intended that as a lesson in humility.
