"When a 38-year-old man fell from his bed during a violent seizure, his wife found him shaking and 'speaking gibberish' on their bedroom floor at 4 a.m."

"After he arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the man, who was reported to be in good health and had no history of related symptoms, suffered another seizure. Doctors were stumped... until a CT scan of his head... finding three brain lesions, doctors diagnosed the man with neurocysticercosis after they concluded that larval cysts from a tapeworm had migrated to his head 20 years ago and embedded into parts of his brain.... 'This gentleman was a little atypical, but not amazingly rare, in that his parasites were dead and calcified and there was no living parasite in his brain for one or two decades... The infection was long gone, but part of his brain was scarred — and that scarred area was leading to the seizures.'"

From "His sudden seizures were a mystery. Then doctors saw a tapeworm in his brain from 20 years ago" (WaPo).

I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years. But then I start thinking about this: "Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature" (Huffpo).

Do you ever worry that the part of you that is really you is not much of anything at all?! 

ADDED: I say "I was relieved to understand that the worm wasn't alive for 20 years," but why would I have thought that? Because the caption under the photograph at the top of the page says, "Doctors found that a tapeworm had been living in a 38-year-old man's brain for 20 years"!