Can you destroy your entire life with one wrong decision

If you look at this photo and think to yourself “hmm, what a happy young man! Probably reasonably out-going as well,” you would be right. In 2010, 19-year-old Australian rugby player Sam Ballard was drinking red wine with his buddies when a slug was found crawling nearby. Among these half-drunk teenagers, naturally the conversation about eating the slug occurred. Yeah, naturally…. I mean come on, it’s just like a garden snail, maybe it’s going to cause a stomach ache and diarrhea, but it sounds like something fun to talk about for at least a whole week, right? Right? Sam decided to go for it himself and soon after, he became weak and complained of severe pain in his legs. After a medical check-up, Sam had reportedly developed something called rat lungworm disease from the infected slug. Quite like what the name implies, it is a disease caused by a kind of parasitic worm that is commonly found in lungs of rats, but can be excreted in poop. Needless to say, that particular slug must have come into contact with rat poop, either through crawling over it or possibly even consuming it. When a human eats the infected animal, the human now carries the worm. Unfortunately, humans aren’t quite structured exactly the same way as rats, so the worm doesn’t get pooped out like it does in rats. Instead, they stay in the human body and depending on where the worm ends up, the end result could be as mild as headaches, nausea, vomiting, fever and a stiff neck. Or as serious as Sam’s. He fell into a coma for over a year, woke up completely paralyzed and stayed that way until his death in 2018.

 Can you destroy your entire life with one wrong decision