Woman's egg-shaped 'growth' in brain leads to unexpected find
There’s been an unusual diagnosis for a woman who was found to have an egg-shaped growth in her brain.
Rachel Palma, 42, began acting bizarrely in January 2018, ABC 7 reports.
Ms Palma, from Manhattan, began dropping her coffee mug and had memory issues.
“There were days that I didn’t know where I was,” she told the Today Show.
The 42-year-old went to a doctor who performed an X-ray on her skull revealing an egg-shaped lesion in her head.
Dr Jonathan Rasouli, a neurosurgery resident at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, told Live Science there were concerns the lesion could be cancerous.
He told the Today Show the lesion “looked like a quail egg”.
Ms Palma underwent a three-hour surgery and had the growth removed.
But on studying what was thought to be a cancerous lesion surgeons discovered it was something entirely different.
The discovery had Dr Rasouli and his colleagues “cheering and clapping”.
It turns out the growth was a parasite. Living in Ms Palma’s skull was a tapeworm.
No one knows how it got into her head. She has never been outside the United States.
It meant Ms Palma probably did not need surgeons cutting into her skull either, but could have just been treated with antibiotics.
She told ABC 7 she has no doubt Dr Rasouli and his team saved her life though.
"I stopped asking questions and started celebrating and making the most out of life," Ms Palma told ABC 7.
"Because in an instant it can be taken away."
It follows a story that emerged in February last year where a woman suffered a rare parasitic infection which affected her eyes.
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