It was Ophidascaris robertsi
A strange incident occurred in an Australian operating theatre in August 2023. Before the operation, the neurosurgeon thought he was going to do a very normal biopsy - a small hole in the skull, collecting a sample, then analyzing it. But he was not at all prepared for what he found when he reached inside the skull.
A live worm! Eight centimetres long!! It was moving inside the brain of an elderly woman!
The woman was sixty-four years old. For months, she had been battling strange symptoms: stomach ache, constant cough, night sweats, and finally, memory loss and depression.
Despite seeing one specialist after another, nothing worked. The MRI only showed a strange scar. So everyone thought - the biopsy would unravel all the mysteries.
When the surgeon inserted the forceps, he felt something soft, thin, and alive. The junior doctor thought it might be an artery. But it was something completely different.
As soon as it was brought to the light, it started writhing! The entire operating theater came to a standstill. When the worm was placed in the pathology dish, it was still writhing.
Later, it was found that it was Ophidascaris robertsi. A type of roundworm that usually lives in the body of a carpet python.
But how did it get into this woman's brain? She is not even known to have touched the snake.
She probably ate some wild plant leaves that had the python's feces on them. Tiny eggs entered her body with those leaves. The larvae that hatched from the eggs wandered around inside her and finally reached the brain. There, they gradually caused all sorts of problems, including inflammation, confusion, and memory loss!
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