The World Almost Lost Hunky Chris Hemsworth To A Bad Bout Of Altitude Sickness

Aussie actor (and Thor himself) Chris Hemsworth had a harrowing near-death experience at 13,000 feet above sea level.

Hemsworth revealed on Jimmy Kimmel last week that he nearly died from altitude sickness while vacationing with his wife in the Himalayas, Us Magazine reported.

Several months prior, his Spanish-born wife, Elsa Pataky, was doing a travel show, Chris explained to Kimmel, and he got to be her “plus one,” People added.

Per safety procedure, Hemsworth and his wife acclimated to the high altitudes slowly. This required “planting yourself in one place” for a couple days in order to get used to the lack of oxygen, before climbing upward, Chris explained.

The first part of the ascent was fine, but above 9,800 feet, Chris said he “slowly, honestly started to kind of lose my mind.”

Chris, 32, didn’t understand what was happening to him at the time, but his wife noticed something was wrong.

“Have you ever heard of altitude depression? I got that … Just completely irrational, everything is overly sensitive to the most trivial sort of silly things.”

One night, Chris, his wife, and their group were up to 13,000 feet. It was 30 degrees below zero, so cold that a bottle of water would freeze if left out overnight; wild, rabid dogs patrolled the camp.

Hemsworth said that he got up to use the bathroom in a separate camp, and when he got back and into his sleeping bag, couldn’t stop tossing and turning. Elsa asked him what was wrong and Chris snapped, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine!”

“And my breathing is getting worse, and I start to like [motions] like Darth Vader meets Daffy Duck.”

Luckily, Chris’ wife didn’t listen to him and notified their guides. They immediately saw that Hemsworth was in serious trouble. According to Entertainment Weekly, they gave him a breathing mask and got him out of there.

“They take one look at me and say, ‘Get him off the mountain,’ ” Chris recalled. “They start injecting me with all sorts of whatever’s going to adjust my oxygen … and fly me down the mountain for eight hours.”

Turns out, Hemsworth was feeling the effects of deadly altitude sickness, and Elsa got him help right in the nick of time.

“Apparently, the [lack of] oxygen in my lungs, the next day would have been [the lack of] oxygen in my brain, and then good night. We wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Altitude sickness kills people every year, according to Altitude.org. There are three types: acute mountain sickness, which feels like a hangover (headache, nausea, fatigue) and is very common. The other two, more severe, versions are HAPE, which is excess fluid on the lungs and causes breathlessness. The second is HACE, and is fluid on the brain, causing confusion, excessive emotion, or violence, as well as clumsiness and drowsiness. It’s caused by low oxygen at high altitudes.

“Everyone else adjusted, acclimated, but for some reason I couldn’t handle it,” Hemsworth noted.

Kimmel, of course, responded in humorous fashion, noting that Hemsworth was too handsome to climb such high mountains.

“You’re not meant to be up in the mountains away from others, you’re meant to be down amongst the people, bringing joy to their eyes,” he joked.

Chris Hemsworth also has three young kids to get home to — two twin boys, aged 2, and a daughter, 4. It his little girl, India, who recently made a shocking request, Hemsworth revealed in an interview with Ellen: she wanted a penis like her brothers, E! News reported.

“My brain’s like, ‘How do we handle this?’ I was like, ‘Girls have breasts.’ ‘I don’t want breasts!’ I was like, ‘OK. Um…’ She goes, ‘I really want one.’ I was like, ‘A penis?’ She was like, ‘I want a penis!’ ‘Oh, OK. Um… You know what? You can be whatever you want to be.’ “

[Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images]