The doctor entered the room with the X-ray in hand and asked just one question: had you been alone at home over the last few days?
The patient did not understand the connection. He asked for a second opinion from another colleague before speaking again. When he returned, the doctor warned him that he was going to tell him something strange and asked him not to panic. What appeared in the image was not the disease they had both imagined at first.
What could be seen on the X-ray were hundreds of tubular, coiled, shiny structures filling the intestine from end to end. In radiology, there is a name for this finding: the spaghetti sign. It corresponds to a massive infestation of Ascaris lumbricoides, adult worms measuring between 15 and 35 centimeters clustered inside the body. The doctor then began asking about every strange symptom the patient had experienced in recent days, trying to understand how so many parasites had come to coexist in the same patient without being detected earlier.
