Which person in history ruined their entire life because they made a single mistake?

 

This is the story of Sam Ballard.

This boy was a 19-year-old rugby player. One day, he was drinking with his friends at a bar when they suddenly saw a snail crawling nearby. As usually happens when there's a group of drunk teenagers, they challenged each other to see who would eat it. Unfortunately, Sam was the one who accepted the challenge.

He swallowed the slug like a pill. After a few minutes, his body began to weaken, his legs trembled, and he felt as if he were about to faint. The slug was infected with a parasite—a parasitic worm commonly found in the lungs of rats.

If a person eats an infected animal, they will then carry the worm. Humans are not anatomically identical to rats, so the worm is not excreted as it is in rats. Instead, it remains in the human body, and depending on where the worm ends up, the end result can be as mild as headaches, nausea, vomiting, or fever.

Or, much more seriously, as in the case of Sam…

He fell into a coma for over a year, woke up completely paralyzed, and remained that way until his death in 2018.