The woman’s mysterious symptoms started in her stomach.
Three weeks later, the woman was in the hospital with a fever and cough. CT scans revealed a clue that was telling, in retrospect: Some of her lung lesions appeared to be migrating. A second clue came months later, when the woman became forgetful and depressed. “She had a very astute GP who thought, ‘Something’s not right here, I better do an MRI of the brain,’” says Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease physician at the Australian National University and the Canberra Hospital.
That brain scan turned up a ghostly glow in her frontal lobe. It could have been cancer, an abscess or another affliction, Senanayake says. “No one thought it was going to be a worm.”
During a biopsy of the woman’s brain, her neurosurgeon spotted a suspicious stringlike structure and plucked it out with forceps. It was pinkish-red, about half the length of a pencil — and still alive.
2023-09-14 06:00:00
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