Sam Ballard ate a Slug

I must admit, I have eaten slightly more than my fair share of bugs.  Some accidentally.  Think of riding a bicycle or motorbike with an open mouth here.  Some bugs (more than I would like to admit) I ate on purpose.  There was a stretch of time (I like to refer to it as high school) where I captured and purposefully ate live flies and moths just to be weird.

It totally worked. 

I was weird.

More recently, I have tried both coconut worms and crickets for dinner.

Not bad, actually

I bring this up in light of a sad story I read the other day.  The story was about a young man from Sydney, Australia, named Sam Ballard.

Back in 2010, Sam was your typical 19-year-old rugby player type.  One night, while Sam and some of his buddies were drinking outside on a concrete patio, a slug slowly made is way across the concrete.

That’s interesting…a slug.

One of the boys, Jimmy Galvin, asked, “Should I eat it?”  Before he could answer for himself, Sam Ballard leapt to action.  He swept up the slug and gulped it down.

At his age, I would have done that…just to be weird.

Shortly after eating the slug, Sam became weak and complained of severe pain in his legs.  As his illness intensified, he was taken to see some doctors.  At this point, Sam admitted to his mother that he had eaten the slug.  She responded, “No one gets sick from that.”

Not long after Sam’s mother made that statement, a group of doctor’s contradicted her.  Sam, they determined, had contracted rat lungworm disease as a direct result of eating the slug.

Slugs can be a vector for the rat lungworm disease.  The disease, as the name might suggest, is caused by a parasitic worm that attacks the lungs of rats.  The parasites are also found rat excrement.  If a slug should happen to eat some of the rat’s pellets and then a human should happen to eat such a slug…well you know where this is going.

Rat lungworm larvae can successfully survive in humans.  Once inside humans, however, the worm larvae tend to get lost in unfamiliar territory.  In the case of Sam Ballard, the larvae migrated to his brain and remained there. 

Sam quickly fell into a coma that lasted and astonishing 420 days.

Though Sam climbed his way out of the coma, he woke to being virtually paralyzed.  To survive from then on, he required 24-hour care. 

Sam’s friends and family continued to rally around him, but his survival was a constant struggle.  The other day, some eight years after Sam ate the slug, he died.

I am here to tell you, I could have easily been Sam Ballard.  It’s the smallest weirdest things you do that might get you.

--Mitchell Hegman