The sad truth of today is that some young people are not brave because they know how to overcome fear, but because they are ignorant. That is why most of them would do a dangerous dare under peer pressure or just to show how “courageous” they are. Hence, one dare might have gone too far after it cost a young man his life, he was dared to eat a slug and paid the ultimate price for it.
Back in 2010, Sam Ballard from Sydney, Australia had his 19th birthday. Everything was all fun and games until he got encouraged to eat a slug. That he did. One of Sam’s friends recalled that it was Sam who dared himself, “We were sitting, having a bit of a red wine appreciation night, trying to act as grown-ups and a slug came crawling across. The conversation came, ‘should I eat it?’ Off Sam went. Bang. That’s how it happened.”
Unfortunately, the slug that Sam ate was infected with a rat lungworm. It caused the 19-year-old to go into a coma for 60 weeks or more than a year because of contracting a strand of meningitis called eosinophilic meningoencephalitis. Sam’s case turned out to be a lot more severe than anticipated as it left him paralyzed from the waist down after he woke up from the coma. His brain got infected.
It was even more heartbreaking for Sam to be in a wheelchair since he was a rugby player before the coma. Sadly, after eight years of medical complications and life in a wheelchair, Sam passed away on Friday last week. He was only 28 when he died. Despite the incident, Sam’s mother did not blame his friends for what happened.
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