WARNING: very gross details! If you are not used to reading about parasites, brace yourself for the worst. The cute graphics in this parasite story allowed me deal better with the fact (well, the trauma) of having a horrid prehistoric monster living inside me, I called mine James.
I had no idea that the human body could host parasites. Especially in the Western world. In addition to that, I had no idea that it could host SO many!
Looking back, the signs were there: Somewhere in the spring of 2013 I had a nasty food poisoning after a binge of my back then favorite food, sushi (not anymore, no thanks).
Some months later I noticed that I was feeling too well after going to the toilet, and I noticed some pine seed looking things in the stool that shouldn’t have been there. I decided to try the Hulda Clark protocol for parasites, even if I hadn’t had seen anything particularly telling. My bioresonance lady also didn’t see any parasites in the tests (boy, was she wrong!). I didn’t think that was my problem.
In the same period I began experiencing serious gallbladder issues, which the doctors attributed to a small gallstone. I managed to avoid having my precious gallbladder removed and my symptoms stayed under control with some dietary adjustments (low fat, apple cider vinegar before eating, lots of apple juice etc) but I felt worse and worse.
In 2015-16 I actually could see a bulge in the duodenum area , but it didn’t particularly hurt or I never felt any movement inside. Three months of Chanca Piedra tea actually gave me back some good digestion.
In february 2016 I was lving in a hotel in Germany while looking for an apartment, and trying out all sorts of new remedies, and I discovered sauerkraut juice. I didn’t know that you have to start really slow with fermented stuff, so one day I drank two glasses and the following day, as I had no fridge in the room and I didn’t want it to go off, I finished the whole bottle. Then I went to a birthday party and had a bit of chocolate cake. When I came back I thought I was going to die. Naively I blamed the cake. Belly stretched like a 7 months – pregnant for a day, I spent the night on the toilet. The stools (pardon the visual) were all covered with these little brown stripes (the tapeworm!) but in my ignorance I had no idea, I just thought “what a strange poop!” and didn’t think about it anymore.
That was my first meeting with the beast. In June 2016, in an effort to heal my damaged peripheral nerves who were going through a crisis, I found a shop that sold fermented food, and I learned to make water kefir and Kombucha at home.
In the first two days of drinking water kefir, a few pinworms were expelled. I was very amazed. Never saw them again, probably there were just a few hanging out in my bowels.
After a few days of the new diet, I was going about my usual toilet business, then I saw it: 25 cm long, laid there in the white toilet bowl in all its majesty. I think l literally lost conscience for some seconds, I remember blacking out. I took plenty of pictures. The following night, I was in my pjs ready to go to sleep, and I felt this huge movement, and actually something crawling in my esophagus (to this day I don’t know if I imagined it but I don’t think so, it happened only that time)
In a panic, I swallowed two cups of boiling coffee, burning my throat- I imagined that would scald the beast into retreat, medieval style. Well, I was not thinking very rationally in that moment.
I called a cab, still in my pjs, and got myself to the ER. The ER doctor seemed quite shaken at seeing the picture of my toilet bowl, and he immediately (after a blatant two minutes Google search) prescribed me Mebendazole , which was the wrong medicine, in the wrong quantity.
I resorted to Google myself to identify the beast. It was flat, thin, rubbery and with horizontal segments, also probably freaking long. It was clearly a fish tapeworm, which made sense considering my past affection for raw fish.
I ordered online the drug with less side effects that would work on tapeworms, Niclosamide.
I was sick as a dog, but in one week of that I expelled lots of segments of the beast, and some large quantity of scary looking eggs in the shape of small black sesame seeds. What I later learned the hard way is that until you get the head, Game of Thrones style, a tapeworm will stay there and continue reproducing segments forever (well, for 20 to 30 YEARS).
This was just the beginning of an 8 months long fight, during which I tried all sorts of remedies (see the list here LINK) and during which the tapeworm’s strenuous defense almost killed me. After 8 months, a second round of Niclosamide probably got the deed done: several symptoms disappeared, digestion improved vastly, and I never saw again neither eggs nor segments.
The problem was, he (it?) was not alone. In the following weeks and months several other nematodes came out, which I identified as: ascaris, male and female (yes! they have sex! thankfully there are zero sources about the mechanics of that) – a few liver flukes, the ones that famously look like rolled in tomatoes skin once dead, but when alive they look like little slugs or snails without a home, I couldn’t imagine those going through my liver – and finally the mysterious rope worm, LINKlong (20-25 cm) strips of mucous but solid matter. I am still not sold on the idea that those things are just mucus plaque.
See a picture of a liver fluke smiling to feel better.
Sorry to freak you out with these horrific details. In fact, the most horrific part of this whole story for me was that no one seemed to want to diagnose me or help me.
At the time I was being followed by a functional doctor, a guy of pretty vast knowledge but very, very low interest in his patients (or maybe just me, because I was going there with public healthcare so he didn’t get a ton of money from me, who knows). Anyway, I brought my best parasites pictures to the next appointment, hoping for some advice or at least validation, but when he just heard the mention of parasites, his face turned of a different color.
I cheerfully pulled out my iPad to show him the pictures, imagining that, as he was so knowledgeable, he might have some curiosity on the topic. Instead, to my surprise, he closed his eyes shut, keep them shut really hard, and vehemently refused to open them until he was sure that the pictures had gone away (just the behaviour you would expect from a doctor and a grown up).
So, the only ace I had in my deck of cards didn’t want to help me. I looked for the best gastroenterologist I could find (two of them, actually, suspecting that one visit would not be enough). The first one didn’t close his eyes but also refused vehemently to see my pictures, and kept repeating that it was not possible, because I had never traveled to exotic countries.
The second one, I will never forget, I explained the problem and this time I had brought a real sample, a 20cm beast (always the tapeworm, the others don’t keep well) in a transparent ziplock bag. As soon as I pulled the plastic bag out of my purse, the doctor, without a word, raised from the chair in a hurry and walked out of the room. Thankfully I hadn’t paid in advance, and I didn’t pay of course. I just left, very puzzled by the experience.
These are true stories. In the same period I was so bedbound again that I had to enlist my poor mother to help me for a couple of weeks. She got hold of my “sample” in the plastic bag, and went to a lab asking to test it. The nurses agreed that is was a worm (of course!), but they also said that usually it doesn’t come out in testing. The doctor, like the others, refused to look at it, got angry because she brought the “sample”, and was really rude to an elderly lady.
Now, I have no idea why conventional doctors get so scared when confronted with intestinal parasites. I heard from friends who live in India and Africa that there the situation is the opposite: whatever your affliction is, a doctor will always try as a first line of treatment some anti-parasitic medicine. Not sure if that is true, but it makes sense.
My parasites came from badly prepared sushi, unwashed vegetables (in my ignorance, for years my washing of vegetables was very approximate, because, hey, they were organic, and soil bacteria are good for you, right? Right?!), and apparently watercress is a haven for liver flukes. I did eat a lot of watercress. Anyway, my parasites had nothing exotic, they were very European. You don’t need to travel to exotic places to get parasites, you just need a poor gut microbiome and a bit of bad luck.
Anyway, I managed to reduce the problem to a manageable situation by trying all these remedies LINK, and for some periods I could swear that my body is free of any kind of guests, then at some point I start digesting badly again and I know it’s time for one of my regular treatments LINK.
I wrote all this freaky (and, let’s say it, sort of humiliating) story because I think it’s important to de-stigmatise parasites and bring them to the forefront of any conversation about health. Parasites affect so many biological processes and are behind so many conditions, and the silence surrounding them in the Western medical system makes no sense.
Please find here the full list of all the treatments I used for parasites. LINK
