California man has tapeworm removed from his brain in life-saving surgery

When the headaches first started in late August, Luís Ortíz tried to ignore them.

But after a day spent skateboarding in early September, the 26-year-old university student found the pain had become too much to bear.

Ortíz became disoriented, and when he started vomiting his mother rushed him to the hospital, where neurosurgeon Soren Singel found the real culprit: a tapeworm larva lodged in his brain.

Worse, the cyst that it formed was stemming the flow of fluid in his brain, Singel told the Napa Valley Register.

Singel drilled a hole above Ortiz’s eyebrow and fished out the worm and the cyst with a neuroendoscope equipped with a grasping tool. “The worm was still wiggling when we pulled it out,” Singel told the Register.

Ortiz told a local CBS affiliate that he had “no idea” where he might have gotten it. But he was lucky to have arrived at the hospital when he did: Singel told the Register that another 30 minutes of the blockage, and Ortiz would have died.

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“I was shocked,” Ortiz 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.”

The surgery and the aftermath have greatly affected his life, Ortiz said. He had to drop out of school, move back home and find a temporary place for his dog. He can’t drive or work.

“My memory is like a work in progress,” he said. “It gets better from therapy,” but he has to remind himself to do his memory exercises and other daily tasks.

Ortiz told CBS that the whole ordeal has given him a “new lease on life”. Although he could not have got cysticercosis from eating undercooked pork, it could result in an intestinal tapeworm and he told the Register he had been “staying away from pork ever since”.