Live worm in woman’s brain: Surgeon reveals traumatising moment

SHAH ALAM - Australian surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi, who found a live parasitic worm in a woman’s brain in a world-first discovery, reveals the traumatising moment during the operation process.

Speaking to Time, the neurosurgeon said she had only begun to touch the patient’s brain as the scan showed something strange.

“I thought, gosh, that feels funny. You could not see anything more abnormal.

“And then I was able to really feel something and I took my tweezers and I pulled it out and thought, ‘Gosh, what is that? It is moving’.

“It was definitely not what we were expecting, everyone was shocked and the worm that we found was happily moving quite vigorously outside the brain,” she said in an interview with Time.

For someone who is afraid of worms, Dr Bandi faces one of her fears in the operation theatre while holding a live worm in her forceps.

“In my everyday life, if I were in the garden and saw a worm, I would be screaming and screeching like the rest of us, but in (operation) theatre, we normally are very controlled.

“It is certainly not what we expect, but it was definitely one of the moments in my life where I’m still traumatised. Since then, holding these forceps has caused me some degree of stress.

“It was really unusual to find something that was so unpredicatable beforehand,” she said.

The surgeon further praised the patient’s spirit of finding the answer after repeatedly failing to do so.

“The patient is well, so we are able to finish the operation and she was really pleased to have an answer.

“For many months, she has been struggling and it was courageous of her to come and have further testing after not having answers for so long.

“But she did really well for knowing what was actually causing all her trouble and then now having treatment for what was causing the trouble,” she said.

Researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) and Canberra Hospital detailed the discovery of the parasitic roundworm.

The eight-cm Ophidascaris robertsi roundworm, which is usually found in pythons, was pulled from the patient, a 64-year-old woman still alive and wriggling after brain surgery.

In a media release, Sanjaya Senanayake, a leading infectious disease expert from ANU and the Canberra Hospital, said it was a world first.

According to the study, the patient was admitted to a local hospital in south-east New South Wales (NSW) in 2021 after three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhea.

In 2022, after she started experiencing forgetfulness and depression, a neurosurgeon at Canberra Hospital identified an abnormality in the right frontal lobe of the brain from an MRI scan, prompting the surgery that discovered the roundworm.

The study hypothesises that the patient was probably infected by touching, or eating, native grasses that a carpet python had shed the parasite into.

She remains under monitoring by infectious disease and brain experts.