In Nanao, Japan, a 36-year-old women went to see the doctor after eating undercooked salmon. It had been two hours since she’d eaten, and in the time since, she’d begun feeling nauseous, experiencing chest pains, and vomiting.
She figured she’d just come down with a stomach bug, but went to the doctor because her symptoms felt more severe than usual.
Her doctors immediately noticed that her abdomen was tender to the touch and conducted scans. The wall of her stomach wall had thickened, so her doctors decided to insert a camera into her stomach for closer examination.
They immediately discovered that her stomach had become infected by worms. The raw salmon had given the woman herring worm disease, anisakis. There were white, wiggling worm larvae burrowing into the walls of her stomach and esophagus.
The doctors used forceps to extract eleven of these creatures from her stomach walls.
Thankfully, once the worms were removed, the woman’s symptoms were immediately relieved.
You can watch a video of the extraction process here:
