00:00 I dissected around the abnormal area that you could see on the scan.
00:04 I thought, "Gosh, that feels funny."
00:06 You couldn't see anything more abnormal.
00:09 And then I was able to really feel something separate.
00:12 I took my tweezers or my chimer-holding forceps
00:15 and I pulled it out and I thought, "Gosh, what is that?"
00:19 "It's moving. Take it out of my hands."
00:21 And we put it in a path pot, thank goodness.
00:24 And it's gone away to the scientists to find out what it was.
00:27 So we immediately called the infectious diseases doctors
00:29 and asked, "What should we do next?"
00:31 It was definitely not what we were expecting.
00:33 Everyone was shocked.
00:34 And the worm that we found was happily moving
00:37 quite vigorously outside of the brain.
00:41 How's the patient?
00:43 Really well.
00:44 So we were able to finish the operation.
00:47 We asked our infectious diseases doctors, "Should we do anything else?"
00:49 "Look around for anything else?"
00:50 And they said, "No."
00:51 At that stage, we closed up and she was really pleased to have an answer.
00:55 For many months, she'd been really struggling
00:57 and it was really courageous of her to come and have further testing
01:01 after not having answers for so very long.
01:03 But she did really well for knowing what was actually causing all her trouble
01:07 and then having now treatment for what was causing the trouble.
01:10 Granted, it's never been described before,
01:12 but the infectious diseases doctors and the team at the Canberra Hospital
01:16 came up with the appropriate treatment strategy for her
01:18 and she's doing quite well.
01:19 So in my normal life, if I was in the garden, if I saw a worm,
01:22 I'd be screaming and screeching like the rest of us.
01:26 But in theatre, we normally are very controlled
01:28 and it's certainly not what we expect,
01:30 but we took that time to sort of take stock, not squish the worm
01:34 so the scientists were able to identify exactly what it was.
01:37 But it's definitely one of those moments in my life
01:39 where I'm still a little bit traumatised.
01:41 Since then, holding these forceps has caused me some degree of stress.
01:45 So it's very unusual to find something that was so unpredictable beforehand.
01:51 The patient involved in this had a protracted illness.
01:56 It was a sort of mystery diagnosis.
01:59 And I was on what we call ward service,
02:02 looking after other patients in the hospital who had infection problems.
02:07 And I got a call saying, "We've got a patient with an infection problem.
02:10 We've just removed a live worm from this patient's brain."
02:14 And so then, of course, there was a flurry of activity
02:18 in our microbiology laboratory, just trying to work out what this worm was.
02:23 And eventually, with the help of a very clever CSIRO scientist,
02:28 we worked out that this was a new parasite
02:31 that had never been seen in a human before.
02:33 The human brain, which is, I mean, quite big, but not huge.
02:37 And this worm was eight centimetres long.
02:41 And it was alive and wriggling when our poor,
02:46 but very skilled neurosurgeon took it out with some forceps.
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