A Florida E.R. nurse recalled the harrowing moment she learned a teenage patient was fed tapeworms by her mother to help her lose weight for a beauty pageant.
Maricar Cabral-Osorio spoke to the show "Untold Stories of the ER" of how the girl's mother brought her in sick with a protruding stomach.
The nurse and other hospital staff initially thought the girl was pregnant, but an ultrasound showed an empty womb. That's when Cabral-Osorio noticed something foreign in another part of her body.
"Something was in her intestines," Cabral-Osorio told the show, which airs Friday on Discovery Fit & Health, according to the New York Daily News.
The unnamed girl excused herself and went to the bathroom. Moments later, the teen began screaming and hospital staff came rushing in.
"The toilet bowl full of tapeworms. Blegh!" Cabral-Osorio said. Everyone stood bewildered thinking about how the parasites, which were alive, ended up inside the girl.
"We were wondering, how did she get those tape worms? And then we saw the mother turn white."
The mother, who complained about how long the nurses took to care for her daughter, broke down and confessed to feeding her daughter tapeworm eggs to help her lose weight. The eggs apparently hatched after they were ingested.
The mother apologized to her daughter, the nurse said.
" 'I just did it to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on to the pageant,' " the mother said according to Cabral-Osorio.
People can become infected with tapeworms by eating undercooked meat, causing appetite loss, stomach pain and diarrhea, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The parasites have been used for nearly 100 years as a way to speed weight-loss.. In August 2013, a woman from Iowa used the same method by swallowing a tapeworm she bought online. Doctors warn that doing so is highly dangerous.
"Ingesting tapeworms is extremely risky and can cause a wide range of unstable side effects, including rare deaths," Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, Medical Director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, wrote last year.
"Those desiring to lose weight are advised to stick with proven weight loss methods- consuming fewer calories and increasing physical activity."
