If something’s bothering you, it’s probably a good idea to get it checked out by the doctor. One California man refused to deal with a series of headaches and ended up paying the price for it.
When Luis Ortiz finally started vomiting after suffering from terrible headaches, his mom rushed him to the hospital and he soon slipped into a coma. Upon waking up, doctors broke the bad news to him—a tapeworm had been living in his brain and he needed to have surgery right away.
"I was shocked," he said. "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." It’s likely that tapeworm eggs from unclean meat made its way into his intestine and eventually to the brain.
According to the Associated Press, he was lucky he arrived when he did. The worm formed a cyst that blocked the flow of water to chambers in his brain and if he’d waited another 30 minutes, he would have been dead. "It was a close call," Dr. Soren Singel told the Napa Valley Register.
In the aftermath of the procedure, Ortiz dropped out of college and moved back home because he is unable to drive or work. "My memory is like a work in progress," he said. These days, the Napa resident has to remind himself to complete his memory exercises and other tasks. He added, "It gets better from therapy."
