Rachel Palma was told that she had a brain tumor. It was Taenia solium tapeworm.

Warning: An image of a lone worm appears below in this article.

The doctors had told Rachel Palma this discouraging news, explaining that the brain lesion was suspected to be a tumor, and her analyzes suggested that she was cancerous.

Palma, a bride entering a new chapter of her life, said she was in shock, not wanting to believe that it was true.

In September, surgeons washed in an operating room at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York opened Palma's skull and mutilated themselves for a malignant brain tumor, said Jonathan Rasouli, a neurosurgery resident at the University of New York. Icahn School of Medicine Mount Sinai. But instead, says Rasouli, they saw an encapsulated mass resembling a quail egg.

"We all said," What is it? "," Recalled Rasouli during a phone interview with the Washington Post. "It was very shocking. We scratched our heads, surprised to see what it looked like.

The surgeons removed it from Palma's brain and placed it under a microscope to take a closer look. Then they sliced ​​in – and found a baby tapeworm.

[He ate raw fish almost every day — until a 5-foot-long tapeworm slithered out of his body]

Palma, from Middletown, N.Y., said she had mixed feelings about it.

"Of course I was disgusted," said the 42-year-old Thursday, explaining that no one wants to think that a solitary worm is growing in an egg in his brain. "But of course, I was also relieved. This meant that no other treatment was necessary.

A scan showing the tapeworm in Rachel Palma's brain. (Mount Sinai Health System)

Palma said she had long suffered from insomnia and nightmares when she could sleep. She said that she had also had hallucinations, imagining that things were happening while they were not happening.

In January 2018, his symptoms worsened. Palma said that she was starting to have trouble holding objects, such as her cup of coffee, which she had inadvertently left on the floor.

She started having trouble sending SMS to people, so she started calling them.

She began to feel confused: she locked herself outside the house, went to work without her uniform and looked at the screen of her computer, unable to to give meaning to words. At one point, she called her parents and left her a message on their answering machine, explaining that the place where she had bought her bed several years ago suddenly wanted it.

After her doctor's appointments and her visits to the emergency room, Palma went to see Mount Sinai Hospital specialists who identified a lesion on her left frontal lobe near a speech treatment center. . Rasouli, chief resident of neurosurgery, said that the shape of the lesion and the way it appeared on the MRI examination led doctors to a dark conclusion: brain cancer.

But after inspection, Rasouli said that it was "obviously not a brain tumor".

Doctors have diagnosed Palma with neurocysticercosis, a parasitic cerebral infection caused by the tapeworm Taenia Solium.

Bobbi Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic, said Taenia Solium is not common in the United States, but when people are infected, the parasite can 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 parasite (Mount Sinai Health System)

But there is another, less common way to catch the parasite.

Adult-shaped people throw microscopic eggs in their stool and, if they do not wash their hands well, they can pass the tapeworm to others, said Pritt.

For example, said Pritt, if the person with the adult tapeworm puts the eggs in his hands and prepares another person's meal, the person can eat the eggs without knowing it. She added that the eggs then spread into the small intestine, turn into larvae, enter the intestinal wall and enter the blood, where they can migrate throughout the body, including the brain.

The larval form appears in the form of a cyst filled with liquid, Pritt added.

According to Pritt, the adult form is treated with a pest control drug, but treatment of the larval form can be complex and depends on the location and stage of the infection.

"I want people to understand that it was a rare event," said Palma about the tapeworm that was in his brain. "Every headache will not be a parasite."

Palma said his symptoms had decreased "almost 100%".

"The best part of my story is that it ends well," she said.

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