Texas Man’s Unbearable Headaches Turn Out to be Tapeworms
40 year-old Gerardo Moctezuma had been experiencing severe headaches for years. Time after time, he would take some Tylenol and suffer through the intense pain just to wake up again the next day and do the same thing all over again.
After years of living through this extremely painful cycle, Moctezuma decided that enough was enough. That's when he decided to visit his doctor to see if there was anything he was missing.
After explaining that the headaches had evolved into the kind that make you dizzy and make you feel like passing out, medical officials decided to take a peek into Gerardo's skull via MRI. That's when they found the cause of his issue: Tapeworms.
The technical term for what was suffering from is neurocysticercosis. It's basically caused by tapeworm larvae growing in his brain and spinal cord. The condition is very rare, with approximately 1,000 contracting it each year.
According to CNN, Moctezuma is expected to make a full recovery now that surgery has removed the larvae - but it almost certainly would have been fatal had he not gone to a medical professional for help.
Doctor's say that he likely contracted the condition long before he moved from Mexico to the United States, and likely ingested them while eating under-cooked pork. He had been been dealing with these excruciating headaches (and the tapeworms in his brain) for more than a decade.