Jamie Dornan and Gordon Smart 'lucky to be alive' after incident on ...

Good Morning Britain's Gordon Smart has told how a trip to Portugal with The Fall actor Jamie Dornan and friends saw them both receiving emergency treatment. Presenter Gordon shared how the group was enjoying some downtime on the golfing trip when some of them started to feel unwell with symptoms that felt like a heart attack.

Gordon spoke about the "scary" ordeal on The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected podcast, and revealed how he was the first to experience symptoms which included a tingling in his left hand and arm. He 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.

"Anyway, the next day we played golf, we were all absolutely dreadful and I started to feel tingling in my left hand and then tingling in my left arm. I'm the son of a GP 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."

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Gordon asked his friends to drop him at the medical centre where he was told his heart rate was 210 beats per minute and was put in an Uber to hospital. He explained: "I got an Uber, collapsed, and woke up in a hospital bed attached to a machine with a doctor saying, 'What on earth have you been doing young man?'"

The 43-year-old was then quizzed about the amount of alcohol the group had drank when he saw one of his friends wheeled past in a hospital bed with "doctors shouting the same questions to him," which Gordon said was a scary experience.

After being discharged, Gordon went back to the house to find one of his pals, Hollywood star Jamie Dornan, hooked up to medical equipment. Jamie then told Gordon: "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."

Luckily, the pair managed to recover, with a doctor calling them a week later to reveal what could have been the unlikely cause behind their unpleasant symptoms. Gordon explained: "About a week later when we'd come back and we'd just assessed our lives, I got a phone call from the doctor who was looking after us and he said, 'Look, espresso martinis aside, at any stage did you come in contact with caterpillars on the golf course?'

"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. We’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive. The good news is it wasn't a caffeine overdose, it wasn't a hangover, it was a poisonous, toxic caterpillar and I live to tell the tale." For more showbiz and television stories, get our newsletter here.