Last week, Sam Ballard, a 28-year-old from Australia, passed away from complications that arose after eating a slug eight years earlier.
Back in 2010, Sam had been drinking wine with friends on the patio of his Sydney home.
The group spotted a garden slug making its way across the area and dared Sam to eat it.
“We were sitting over here having a bit of red wine appreciation night, trying to act grown up, and a slug came crawling across here,” said Jimmy Galvin, one of Sam’s closest friends.
“The conversation came up, you know. ‘Should I eat it?'”
“And off Sam went. Bang. That’s how it happened.”
The 19-year-old soon realized he had made a grave mistake.
Soon after eating the slug, Sam started feeling extreme pain in his legs. He worried he may be developing MS because it runs in his family, but doctors soon informed him he had developed rat lungworm disease.
As the name suggests, rat lungworm disease is caused by a parasitic worm that lodges itself in the lungs of rats. Eventually, the parasite is excreted in the rat’s dung, where it is eaten by other animals, like slugs.
When Sam ate the contaminated slug, the parasite contaminated him too.
Unfortunately, the worm cannot complete its life cycle in humans. Instead, it “can get lost, and it will go to the brain, and it’ll stay there,” Heather Stockdale Walden, an assistant professor from the University of Florida, told CNN. Once in the brain, the worm causes inflammation of brain membranes and the spinal cord, a condition known as eosinophilic meningitis.
Most people recover from eosinophilic meningitis, but tragically, Sam continued to deteriorate.
The young man, who had once been a keen rugby player, fell into a coma lasting more than a year. When he eventually awoke, he had suffered brain damage and paralysis. He would require care for the rest of his life.
Despite the changes, friends and family claim ‘the old’ Sam was still beneath the surface. Galvin told ‘The Sunday Project” (obtained via CNN):
“I apologized to Sam about everything that happened that night in the backyard, and he just started bawling his eyes out.”
“I know he’s there.”
Sam’s mom faithfully took care of him for nearly a decade until, as 10Daily announced last week, Sam passed away.
According to the news outlet, upon his death, Sam was surrounded by 20 of his closest family members and friends. His last words to his mother were “I love you”.
Hear the heartbreaking story below.
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In this special report @Lisa_Wilkinson talks to the amazing family and friends of Sam Ballard #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/UXY5KGeWjF
— The Project (@theprojecttv) April 1, 2018
