FRESNO, Calif. – A man with a hearty appetite for sushi pulled a 5-and-a-half foot tapeworm out of his body, and then went to the emergency room to find out what was happening.
KFSN reports the man walked into the Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno last August with the tapeworm wrapped around a toilet paper roll.
"He grabs it, and he pulls on it, and it keeps coming out," Kenny Banh, the doctor who treated the man, said on a podcast. "He then picks the thing up, 'looks at it, and what does it do? It starts moving.'"
The unidentified man said he realized something was wrong when he felt something hanging from his rectum while he was going to the bathroom. The man had complained of bloody diarrhea before finding the tapeworm.
Banh says the man admitted to eating sushi every day, particularly salmon sashimi.
Raw fish is a common cause of tapeworms. The report says the tapeworm was likely growing in the man's body for six months.