Luis Ortiz was rushed to hospital where doctors discovered that a tapeworm larva had wedged inside his brain, leaving him with just 30 minute to live.
A 26-year-old student who thought he was suffering from severe headaches actually had a live tapeworm wriggling around inside his brain.
After a month of pain, Luis Ortiz, from California, became disorientated and began vomiting. His mother rushed him to hospital where his condition worsened and he eventually lost consciousness.
Doctors at the Queen of the Valley Medical Center, in Napa, performed numerous tests and a brain scan finally revealed that a tapeworm larva had wedged inside his brain and formed a cyst that was blocking the circulation of water.
Surgery was performed immediately, without which Ortiz could have died within 30 minute.
“We made a hole in skull bone over the eyebrow and drove the camera into the centre of the brain and fished out the cyst and the worm… The worm was still wiggling when we pulled it out,” Dr Soren Singel, one of the neurosurgeons who performed the emergency surgery, told the Napa Valley Register .
“Another 30 minutes of that blockage and he would have been dead. It was a close call,” he disclosed.
Once the cyst was successfully removed from his brain, Ortiz was shown the tapeworm. “I was like, ‘That came out of me?’ It looked pretty gross,” he said.
“I was shocked … I just couldn’t believe something like that would happen to me. I didn’t know there was a parasite in my head trying to ruin my life.”
Singel said that Ortiz had probably eaten a salad or unwashed food that was contaminated with tapeworm eggs.
These eggs would have travelled into his intestine, and the larvae would’ve eventually made it into his brain, causing a parasitic tissue infection called cysticercosis.
“I was really lucky,” Ortiz said. “They said, ‘If you came in a hour later, you wouldn’t be alive.’ I’m grateful for all the things the doctors and my parents have done.”
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