A man who was left paralyzed after being dared to eat a slug by friends shared one last heartbreaking message before his tragic death.
The heart-shattering incident took place in 2010 when an Australian man named Sam Ballard engaged in what seemed like a harmless prank.
The then-19-year-old boy, who was a promising rugby player from Sydney, was enjoying a weekend get-together with friends when the group noticed a live slug in the garden and urged the teenager to eat it.
The decision had life-altering consequences for Ballard and ultimately led to his death.
One of his closest friends, Jimmy Galvin, recalled the moment Ballard consumed the insect during an interview with Australian outlet, The Project.
"We were sitting over here having a bit of a red wine appreciation night, trying to act as grown-up and a slug came crawling across here," Galvin explained. "The conversation came up, you know. ‘Should I eat it?’ And off Sam went. Bang. That’s how it happened."
At first, everything seemed fine, and the friends carried on as usual. But in the days following that fateful evening, the young man began to complain that he was experiencing intense pain in his legs.
He voiced his concerns to his mother, Katie, even suggesting that the pain might be linked to the slug he had eaten. However, she dismissed the idea, and said: "No one gets sick from that."
After a visit to the hospital, it was determined that Ballard had been infected by the parasite Angiostrongylus cantonensis - a worm commonly found in rats but is also present in snails or slugs after they eat rodent droppings.
The infection led to Sam contracting eosinophilic meningoencephalitis and lapsing into a coma for 420 days, suffering a severe infection of his brain. While this form of the disease is treatable, it left him paralyzed. He needed help eating and using the bathroom, and could only control his breathing and eyelids.
Ballard tragically passed away in 2018, eight years after the incident. According to The Washington Post, he uttered his final heartbreaking words to his mother which were: "I love you".
Ballard's mom once revealed that she has never blamed her son's friends for what happened.
"[Online trolls would say] the boys should be the ones paying for Sam to be looked after," she told NZ Herald. "How stupid that a kid does something like that and expects everybody to pay for it.
"It's tough to fathom that there are people that can't understand there is a very sick kid who has lost everything health-wise. His family have lost him, you know. And all the great times they should have had with him," she continued, adding that they were "just being mates".