OMG!
Surgeons opened her skull to remove a cancerous tumor. Instead, they found a tapeworm.
Bg: An image of a tapeworm appears lower in this article.
Doctors had broken the disheartening news to Rachel Palma, explaining that the lesion on her brain was suspected to be a tumor, and her scans suggested that it was cancerous.
Palma, a newlywed entering a new chapter in her life, said she was in shock, unwilling to believe it was true.
In September, scrubbed-up surgeons in an operating room at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City opened Palma’s cranium and steeled themselves for a malignant brain tumor, said Jonathan Rasouli, chief neurosurgery resident at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. But instead, Rasouli said, they saw an encapsulated mass resembling a quail egg.
“We were all saying, ‘What is this?’ ” Rasouli recalled Thursday in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “It was very shocking. We were scratching our heads, surprised at what it looked like.”
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Bobbi Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory in the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, said Taenia solium is not common in the United States but, when people do become infected, the parasite can present in two different forms. The most common form, she said, is the adult tapeworm, which is ingested from undercooked pork and lives in the gut.
But there’s another, less common way to get the parasite.
People who have the adult form shed microscopic eggs in their stool and, if they do not properly wash their hands, they can pass on the tapeworm to others, Pritt said.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/06/06/surgeons-opened-her-skull-remove-cancerous-tumor-instead-they-found-tapeworm/?utm_term=.d4250202b949
DO SOMETHING!
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