A 26-year-old student attending California State University, Sacramento, went to the emergency room with an incredibly bad headache and a bout of vomiting. Maybe a bad hangover? Not likely since the student had these symptoms on-and-off since August.
It was way worse than he could have imagined. It was a tapeworm, kids. A Tapeworm!
Luis Ortiz said he started to experience headaches in late August. However, he didn’t “think much of it (and) just ignored it,” reported the Napa Valley Register.
When he visited a friend and his parents in Napa, Calif., in September, he said the pain got worse. After his mother reportedly saw Ortiz vomiting, she rushed him to a local hospital’s emergency room.
Doctors told Ortiz he needed immediate surgery to remove the larva, according to the Associated Press. Ortiz’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Soren Singel, said another 30 minutes of the blockage and “he would have been dead.”
I mean there’s luck and then there’s “JESUS CHRIST THAT WAS CLOSE!” I think we all know where this situation sits.
The doctor explained that the tapeworm “was forming a cyst that blocked the flow of water to different chambers within Ortiz’s brain, sort of ‘like a cork in a bottle.'” The doctors concluded the tapeworm likely occurred due to something Ortiz ate that had tapeworm eggs in it and yeah I’m not eating again today either.
[via USA Today]