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   SUBMIT   FOXNEWS.COM HOME > HEALTH
     
It's Not a Tumor - Doctors Find Worm In Woman's Brain Instead
Thursday, November 20, 2008

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MyFoxPhoenix.com


Doctors discover worm in woman's brain instead of the tumor they thought they were removing.
Doctors in Arizona thought a Phoenix-area woman had a possible brain tumor, but it turned out there was something else penetrating her brain – a worm.

Rosemary Alvarez started experiencing numbness in her arm and blurred vision. She went to the emergency room twice and had a cat scan, but everything came up clear, MyFOXPhoenix.com reported.

Click here for a video.

It wasn’t until doctors took a closer look at an MRI that they discovered something very disturbing.

“Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good,” neurosurgeon, Dr. Peter Nakaji told the news station. “It's something down in her brain stem which is as deep in the brain as you can be.”

Alvarez was wheeled into surgery where Nakaji and his colleagues were expecting to remove a tumor, but they uncovered a worm instead.

On a video of the surgery, Nakaji can be heard chuckling after he made the discovery.

“I'm sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room,” he told MyFOXPhoenix.com. “But because I was so pleased to know that it wasn't going to be something terrible.”

Although doctors don’t know exactly where Alvarez contracted the worm – they said it could come from eating undercooked pork or it can be spread by people who don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom, according to the report.

“It only takes one person who is spreading it constantly to get a lot of people exposed and some of those people are going to go on to develop this problem,” Nakaji said.

Alvarez said she hopes people learn this lesson from her story.

“Wash your hands, wash your hands.”

Click here to read more and see the video of the surgery from my MyFOXPhoenix.com.

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Although doctors don’t know exactly where Alvarez contracted the worm –

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Ten bucks says Mexico.

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Ten bucks says Mexico.

“I'm sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room,” he told MyFOXPhoenix.com. “But because I was so pleased to know that it wasn't going to be something terrible.”

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My wife has worked in ophthalmology for close to fifteen years and saw this for the first time not too long ago....


http://www.stanford.edu/group/parasites/ParaSites2006/Loiasis/Images/loa_loa_eye.gif


Loa Loa Worm in the eye. Guy was back from a trip to Africa and started having itchy eyes that wouldn't go away. He said he started to feel it moving and then he could actually see it at the surface. Pretty rare here in the states and totally bizarre to see in person.