Los Angeles, Jan 22 (IANS): Hollywood star Jamie Dornan said that he's 'lucky to be alive' after he encountered toxic caterpillars during his holiday.

The actor was on holiday in Portugal with friends when he started suffering from heart attack symptoms, which were most likely to have been caused by 'toxic' caterpillars.

He had to be hospitalised due to the pain, reports mirror.co.uk.

His friend also experienced some of the symptoms while they were at the golfing resort.

Doctors asked the actor’s friend how much they had to drink the night before concluding that the symptoms were caused by caterpillars.

"It turns out we’d brushed up against hairy processionary caterpillars and have been very lucky to come out of that one alive," said Jamie’s friend Gordon Smart.

Speaking on The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected, Gordon explained how they had a 'great' first day at the hotel. Barely 24 hours later, he started feeling 'tingling in his left hand and tickling in his left arm'.

The tiny hairs of the caterpillars have an irritating protein called thaumetopoein. It could cause painful skin, eye and throat irritations and rashes and, in rare cases, allergic reactions.

Gordon explained: "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 tickling 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."

When he got to a local medical centre, a nurse found that his heart rate was 120 beats a minute and he quickly found an Uber to the hospital.

The star 'collapsed' and woke up "in a hospital bed attached to a machine with a doctor saying, 'What have you been doing young man?'"

"At that point, he asked me a list of what we’d had to drink the day before as a Scottish man in Portugal, when you start saying, 'Well, I think there were nine bottles of white wine, I had six espresso martinis' and I could see him shaking his head disgusted with the Scottish specimen in front of him," he said.