A family vacation in Thailand has turned into an ongoing nightmare for a young woman who has spent the past seven years at the mercy of a rare parasite, which she contracted there, according to the British “Daily Mail” website, and 20-year-old nursing student Tess Swift returned home from vacation in 2015. With a slight stomach ailment, she was rushed to the hospital a few weeks later.

Since then, Swift has been hospitalized, with doctors trying to figure out what was wrong before she finally got the answers she needed two months ago.

She contracted a disease caused by a parasite called “gnathostoma” that attacked her digestive system, partially paralyzed her digestive system, and forced Swift to wear a feeding tube for the past four years..

during the treatment phase

An immediate treatment would probably kill the parasite, but Swift, now 28, continues to live with untreatable effects such as chronic pain and nausea and battling multiple mental illnesses.. She is now sharing her plight to serve as a warning to other travelers about the potentially deadly parasite.

She said: ‘It kind of ruined my life, I was only 20 when it happened and there was so much going on in your life when I was 20, there was so much to miss because I was in the hospital or I was so unwell that I I couldn’t go, I ended up losing a lot of my friendships because I was so unwell I couldn’t do anything.”

Within six months of first feeling ill, Swift quit her nursing degree.

girl during the trip

Because she was in and out of hospital regularly, she was forced to move back with her parents near Geelong, about two hours southwest of Melbourne..

Doctors spent seven years trying to figure out what made Swift so ill, diagnosing her with everything from irritable bowel syndrome to eating disorder, but no treatment could help reduce her symptoms..

She was partially paralyzed in 2018

And in 2018, it was revealed that her digestive system was partially paralyzed and the first feeding tube was placed directly into her stomach.

The following year, Swift was at her worst and spent six and a half weeks in the hospital, being tested for countless rare diseases as a last resort. Testing was done in Bangkok and Thailand with a pandemic. Covid-19 Which caused long delays.

The tests were set nearly three years later in November 2022, in a letter from Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, a hospital Swift has never visited before..

“I thought it was a scam,” Swift’s mother, Virginia Dixon-Swift, recalled.

She was diagnosed with gnathostoma

Swift discovered that she was infected with gnathostoma, a parasitic infection caused by several types of parasitic worms of the genus Gnathostoma which can be fatal in some cases.