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NEW YORK • Doctors announced the discouraging news to Ms. Rachel Palma, explaining that the lesion on her brain was suspected to be a tumor and that, according to her exams, she was cancerous.
Ms. Palma, 42, a bride entering a new chapter of her life, said she was in shock, not wanting to believe that it was true.
Last September, surgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York opened Ms. Palma's skull and armed themselves for a malignant brain tumor, said the neurosurgery resident of the school of New York. Icahn medicine of the hospital.
But instead, says Dr. Jonathan Rasouli, they saw an encapsulated mbad resembling a quail egg.
"We were all saying" What is it? ", Recalled Dr. Rasouli during a phone interview with the Washington Post.
The surgeons removed her from Ms. Palma's brain and placed her under a microscope. Then they sliced in – and found a baby tapeworm.
Ms. Palma said, "Of course I was disgusted, but of course, I was also relieved, which meant that no other treatment was necessary."
She said that she had long suffered from insomnia and nightmares when she could sleep. She had also had hallucinations, imagining that things were going on that were not happening.
Last January, his symptoms worsened. Ms. Palma stated that she was starting to have trouble holding objects, such as her coffee cup, that she had inadvertently slipped. She had trouble sending SMS to people, so she started calling them. She began to experience confusion by locking herself out of the house and looking at her computer screen, unable to make sense of the words.
After appointments with the doctors and visits to the emergency room, she went to see Mount Sinai Hospital specialists who identified a lesion on her left frontal lobe, near of a speech processing center.
Neurocysticercosis, a parasitic infection of the brain caused by the Taenia solium tapeworm, was then diagnosed.
Dr. Bobbi Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic, said that Taenia solium was not common in the United States, but that the parasite could come in two different forms.
The most common form, she said, is the adult tapeworm, ingested from undercooked pork and living in the intestines.
The least common way of catching the parasite is when adult-shaped people throw microscopic eggs in the stool and, if they do not wash their hands well, transmit the tapeworm to others.
If the person who has the adult tapeworm puts the eggs in his hands and then prepares another person's meal, that person may unknowingly eat the eggs.
The eggs then enter the small intestine, hatch into larvae, enter the intestinal wall and enter the blood stream, where they can migrate throughout the body, including the brain.
WASHINGTON POST
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