Jamie Dornan was hospitalized, and his friend is opening up about the symptoms that drove him to seek urgent medical care.

For ages, Jamie Dornan has been one of our favorite hot Irish celebrities.

But even if he weren’t handsome or famous (or Irish), this would be scary and tragic. And a little bizarre.

During a recent trip, Jamie Dornan ended up in the hospital with “heart attack” symptoms … thanks to an unlikely culprit.

Gordon Smart is a friend of Jamie Dornan, and opened up about the scary hospitalization on BBC’s The Good, The Bad, and the Unexpected podcast.

Jamie was not the only young, athletic man to suffer heart attack symptoms.

His friend Gordon also ended up in the hospital during their recent trip to a golfing resort in Portugal. This happened last year, in 2023.

At first, Jamie Dornan’s symptoms were not too bad.

Gordon Smart shared that, far from assuming the worst, he and Jamie initially believed that they’d simply had too many drinks the night before.

Still, it was bad enough that they had to go to the hospital. Alcohol can cause heart failure and other medical emergencies (it is literally a poison), but it was not the culprit.

Instead, Gordon and Jamie learned that this was all due to a nasty encounter with processionary caterpillars. Yes, caterpillars.

What are pine processionary moth caterpillars?

The caterpillars that hospitalized Jamie Dornan are a known pest in Europe and Asia, famous for irritating hairs and for damaging pines and cedars. These caterpillars possess tiny hairs containing a toxin — a protein, specifically — that causes painful irritation in the skin, eye, and throat.

Gordon recalled feeling a “tingling in his left and and tickling in his left arm” just one day into the vacation.

He very understandably believed this to be “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,” Gordon reasoned.

He shared that he received a discharge from the hospital after doctors and nurses had looked him over. They had not yet advised him of the cause of his symptoms, however.

However, he was not alone. He soon saw buddy Jamie Dornan hooked up to medical equipment.

Like Gordon, Jamie Dornan was hospitalized

“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,’” Gordon recalled on the podcast.

It sounds like Jamie experienced more severe symptoms than Gordon.

“Anyway, as he left the hospital, the paramedics asked them for a selfie,” Gorden described, “which is really what you want when you’re being wheeled out of a hospital room.” That last part was sarcastic.

It was only a week later that Gordon and Jamie heard from the doctor, who offered an explanation.

Toxic caterpillars are seldom anyone’s first suspect. But the location, and their time at a golf resort, were a major clue.

“And it turns out that there are caterpillars on golf courses in the south of Portugal,” Gordon explained, “that have been killing people’s dogs and giving men in their 40s heart attacks.”

The two friends had bad luck — but it could have been worse

“It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive,” Gordon summarized.

“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,” he then spelled out.

That is good news. Caterpillars use natural defenses like irritating proteins to deter predators, but it can make them a danger to anyone who gets too close.