Journalist Gordon Smart described in a podcast interview how he and Jamie Dornan ended up requiring emergency care while traveling to Portugal in 2023 with two other friends.
During a guest appearance on The Good, The Bad, and The Unexpected podcast, journalist and former showbiz editor Gordon Smart, who was on vacation with the actor from Northern Ireland, related the story.
He claimed that after consuming alcohol the day before, including wine and espresso martinis, he and Dornan both became sick while playing golf.
Claiming to have been the first to experience symptoms, such as tingling in his left arm and hand, Smart left his three friends behind and entered a medical center, secretly fearing he was having a heart attack.
He was put in an Uber to the hospital after being informed that his heart rate was 210 beats per minute. The British Heart Foundation states that a normal resting heart rate should be between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
“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?'”
“It’s not encouraging.”
Smart claimed that after the doctor questioned him about the beverages he had had the day before, he noticed Dornan being wheeled past on a hospital bed.
“I thought, that’s not a good sign, that he’s in the same state as me,” Smart stated. “At which point they left me in the room to calm down for a second.”
He said that after consuming six espresso martinis on top of the other alcoholic beverages they had consumed, he called his father, a physician, who advised him he might have caffeine poisoning.
“I had to endure it to some extent,” stated Smart. “It was a pretty scary time.”
