A girl suffering from agonizing stomach pains in the hospital discovered that she was riddled with tapeworms after her mother made her eat them to lose weight before a beauty pageant.
At first, nurses thought the teenage girl could be pregnant when she admitted herself to an emergency room in Florida, US, with severe stomach pain, but an ultrasound showed that she was not.
Nurses found that her intestines were swollen; however, after she took a trip to the toilet, they discovered the real source of her pain. “It was a toilet bowl full of tapeworms,” Maricar Cabral-Osorio, a nurse who attended to the girl, told the TV programme ‘Untold Stories of the ER’.
“It was so gross; she pooped all these tapeworms. There were a couple that were very long and wiggling around trying to get out of the toilet bowl,” she said.
The story came to light when the show aired on Discovery’s ‘Fit & Health’ channel, reported United Press International. The show revealed that the mother bought tapeworm eggs in Mexico and forced her daughter to take them in order to lose weight ahead of a beauty pageant.
“We were wondering, how did she get those tapeworms? And then you saw the mom turn white,” Cabral-Osorio added. “The mom apologized to the girl. It’s like, ‘I’m so sorry. You know, I did it just to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on the pageant’,” she added.
It is not known whether the mother faced criminal charges as a result of her actions or not.
Content contributed by Loulla Mae Eleftheriou Smith, reported from Florida, USA, sourced by independent.co.uk
