Woman horrified after discovering she had 38 parasites in her brain years after returning from holiday
A Welsh woman returned from a trip to India with a tapeworm that left her with 38 parasites in her brain causing seizures, headaches and psychosis.
Lowri Denman went on a two-month long holiday to India with a friend back in 2007, and decided to stick to a vegetarian diet in an attempt to reduce the risk of getting food-borne illnesses.
However, four years on from her trip, she was horrified to pass a metre-long tapeworm that doctors believe she picked up while in India.
Up until that point, Lowri had no signs or symptoms that anything was wrong and after visiting her doctor she assumed that the worst was over.
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But it was just the beginning as she soon began to experience ‘really bad headaches’ and in 2011 had a tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure – which is characterised by stiffness, loss of consciousness, and jerking movements, according to the NHS.
Realising something wasn’t right, she visited her doctor and eventually had a brain scan that confirmed she had neurocysticercosis – a parasitic infection of the brain caused by the larvae of the pork tapeworm.
Neurocysticercosis develops when a tapeworm infection is left untreated and is the most severe form of the disease.
She told PA Real Life: “It was just so disgusting to think that these things were in my head.”
Lowri was treated for epilepsy while doctors consulted tropical disease experts across the globe to decide on a course of action for eliminating the parasites.
'I thought I was going to die'
In the meantime, she lost her driving license due to the risk of having a seizure while behind the wheel and she began to feel anxious about leaving her house.
Medics treated her condition with drugs and her seizures reduced but by 2015 she was in the midst of a serious flare up as the parasites ‘weren’t dying off as they’d expected’.
Things got so bad that Lowri was forced to give up her job and move back in with her dad.
Her mental health was also impacted, and in 2016 she was admitted to a neuropsychiatric ward for three months.
'Nobody could tell me when I was going to get better'
“I was having panic attacks, I thought I was going to die, I think, and then that turned into paranoia, and then the psychosis came out,” she said.
“I wasn’t stable at all, all these thoughts and crazy things were going on in my head.”
Lowri said that it’s hard to know whether these symptoms were directly caused by the parasites or due to the stress of her prolonged treatment.
“It just built into this huge thing at that point, nobody could tell me when I was going to get better,” she said.
In early 2017, Lowri came out of hospital but admitted that she was still in a ‘bad way’ but was determined to get her life back.
Today, Lowri is doing much better and her seizures are managed by medication, meaning she hasn’t suffered one in a decade and was able to return to work in 2022.
Now that she’s recovered from the ordeal, Lowri wants to share her story with the world in the hopes of helping others.
She said: “I spent my whole thirties being ill and anxious and worried, and now I’ve moved into my 40s, I want to do something positive with that negative thing – help other people, and not just feel like I’ve lost all of this time.”
Topics: Health
Claire Reid