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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, chief resident of Neurosurgery at the Mount Sinai Medical School of Icahn. But instead, says Rasouli, they saw an encapsulated mass resembling a quail egg.
"We all said," What is it? "Rasouli is recalled Thursday during a phone interview with the Washington Post. "It was very shocking, we scratched our heads, surprised to see how it looked."
The surgeons removed it from Palma's brain and placed it under a microscope to observe it more closely. Then they sliced in – and found a baby tapeworm.
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, which meant that no other treatment was needed."
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 doctor 's appointments and visits to the emergency room, she went to see Mount Sinai Hospital specialists who identified a lesion on her left frontal lobe, near her home. a speech processing center. Rasouli, chief resident of neurosurgery, explained that the shape of the lesion and its appearance at the MRI examination had led doctors to a dark conclusion: brain cancer.
But after inspection, Rasouli said that it was "obviously not a brain tumor".
The doctors diagnosed Palma with neurocysticercosis, a parasitic cerebral infection caused by the Taenia solium tapeworm.
Bobbi Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic, said that Taenia solium was not common in the United States but that, when people were infected, 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.
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 who has the adult tapeworm puts the eggs on their hands then prepares another person's meal, that other 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 decreased "almost 100%".
"The best part of my story is that it ends well," she said.
– The Washington Post
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