A pageant mom reportedly fed her daughter tapeworms prior to a competition to make the child lose weight. Appearing on Untold Stories of the E.R. on Discovery Fit & Health, pediatric E.R. nurse Maricar Cabral-Osorio recalled the terrible discovery of her teen patient and it’s not for the squeamish.
- Cabral-Osorio first thought the teen was pregnant. When she arrived at the hospital with a bulging stomach, the nurse thought the most obvious explanation was that the girl was pregnant, but after she did an ultrasound, there was definitely no baby there. However, “Something was in her intestines,” Cabral-Osorio said.
- When the patient went to the bathroom, she started screaming. That’s when Cabral-Osorio went in and saw the cause of the commotion. “It was a toilet bowl full of tapeworms. Blegh!” she said. “It was so gross and she had pooped all these tapeworms. There were a couple that were very long and wiggling around trying to get out of the toilet bowl.”
- The nurse did her best to calm the patient. She explained to the teen that now that the tapeworms were out of her body, she would make a full recovery and be totally fine. However, it remained unknown how she got such a terrible infection.
- Turns out, the girl’s mom purposely gave her tapeworms. “We were wondering how did she get those tapeworms, and then you saw the mom turn white,” Cabral-Osorio recalled. “The mom was apologizing to the girl. It’s like ‘I’m so sorry. You know, I did it just to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on to the pageant.'” The mom said that she didn’t give her daughter live tapeworms but pills with tapeworm eggs. Gross!
- It’s unclear whether there were any legal ramifications of what happened. You would think that what this mother did was child abuse and should be reported to authorities, but it’s unclear whether that was the case. Hopefully the girl got away from the mother ASAP.
