Heavy or Stubborn Fasciolopsis Buski Infestation

Hello all, I'm in kinda bad shape right now and desperately need some help/answers. I'm a mumble mumble 40-something year old woman who's a bit of a technical and Science geek and I seem to have contracted what appears to be Fasciolopis Buski from eating food containing a huge number of metacercarae of F.Buski at an Asian restaurant in Hollywood California. Within 48 hours of eating there, I developed a classic cytokine immune reaction that made me feel awful all over and my knees, hips, and ankle joints all hurt so bad I could barely walk for almost 2 more days. I originally thought I was just having some kind of gout flare up since I've had that in my big toe before, but never elsewhere. I was also exhausted and run down from a 20 hour drive back home halfway across the USA. I took some Alleve for a couple days and then I felt fine until a couple weeks later I began having gastrointestinal discomfort and started to notice some mucus and little white fuzzy fibrous matter, and some blood in my stool. I thought oh hell, I picked up a bad pinworm infection on my trip to California, probably from the hotel I stayed in out there, so I treated myself with OTC pyrantel pamoate pinworm medication and felt better, and began meticulously cleaning everything, changing my bedding, all that jazz for standard pinworm eradication protocol of housekeeping and personal hygiene. I stopped seeing any blood in my stool, but there was still some fuzzy white strands and mucous so I started the most unpleasant task of looking for evidence of dead pinworms in my toilet after taking each dump. For the next several weeks I couldn't find anything but mucus strands which disintegrated if I tried to collect any for a specimen to take to my doctor, who was out of town and soonest appointment was another week away, so I repeated the pyrantel pamoate treatment and the mucus almost went away entirely, but my guts still felt not right. i got to see my doctor finally and he believed I'd got the diagnosis right and if I saw anything unusual in the toilet to then repeat the pyrantel pamoate treatment but take the full little bottle of Reese's OTC treatment, and do that for three days in a row and eat a half to one pound of fresh pineapple every night before bedtime, on the morning of the fourth day I awoke abruptly with bad intestinal cramps and barely made it to my bathroom and blew a massive load of diarrhea into the toilet.and felt very ill. After I physically recovered enough to clean myself in the shower and take a look at what came out with a bright flashlight shining into the toilet, I freaked... total panic, I had never seen things like that before in my life and there were about 40-50 of them in there all tangled up in a mass intertwined jungle of greenish yellow plant-like, vine-like fibrous matter which I originally assumed was undigested pineapple material. Most were about a half to 3/4" long and 3/8" to 1/2" wide almond shaped. A couple of them were huge nearly an inch wide and 1.25-1.5" long and they had a horrid fishy smell. I wanted to gather up a few to put into a glass jar with alcohol to take to my doctor and got some of the small and medium ones but the giant ones disintegrated when I tried to free them from tangle of jungle vine like fibrous matter surrounding them. They stank to high heaven and I thought I was going to begin vomiting so I flushed the toilet and sealed the jar of what I'd collected and then I washed my hands and had to go lay down in my bed, curled up in a fetal position and began to cry uncontrollably. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die rather than think those things came out of me and probably more still inside eating me from the insides out.

I somehow fell asleep and drifted off into a nightmare dream where I was trapped inside a large building with many corridors and rooms, and dead ends. A hoard of these creatures 10' tall, like outer space monsters from something like the Aliens sci fi movie, were roaming the corridors for something to feed on.... me. There was nobody else in the building, the rooms were all empty and I could find no weapons to fight back with and suddenly I found myself trapped in a dead end corridor with no escape and they were closing in on me. I was terrified, my heart raced so fast the beats blurred into a buzz, I was helpless and about to die and all I could do is stand there and pee myself uncontrollably and as the first one was about to bite into my head with a gruesome mouth ringed with giant teeth, I screamed a bloodcurdling scream at the top of my lungs, which woke me up. I was actually screaming that scream out loud for real. My nearest neighbor lives a quarter mile down the road and if she would've been home she probably would've heard me. As soon as I caught my breath and my heart quit racing so fast I realized I was laying in a puddle of my own pee. "F-Word!" I yelled out loud. Now I'm pissed, literally and figuratively. Those fargain bastages caused me to have the worst nightmare in 20 years and pee my own bed. This is now WAR. No more sniveling crybaby little girl cowering in fear before these GD SoBs. I'm now Sigourny Weaver about to crawl into the driver's seat of a big mechanical exoskelton robot thing and kick ass with a flamethrower and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of gum. They must die. All of them.


Ok, enough of the theatrics, hope y'all enjoyed. Time to get down to the nitty gritty. I got my jar of creatures and bright LED flashlight and dove into the Internet to try to find out what the hell they were, how could ai possibly have gotten infected with them, and how do I eradicate them or am I effed and need to put my affairs in order and prepare to face my own mortality like a warrior... First call my doctor and try to get an emergency appointment. He's a good guy and a smart guy but I have my doubts he's ever handled a case like this yet, but he might know of a good parasite specialist. Crap, he's out of town again for 2 more weeks, but his office girls put me down for an emergency appointment the first day he gets back and I decline their offer to help me select a temporary substitute since I don't trust any other doctors in this town to know how to pick their own noses let alone handle this......thing. And I've learned one strategy that sure worked to expel a big batch of them. The Reese's pinworm pyrantel pamoate might not be a big enough de-worming hammer to slay them all, but combined with fresh pineapple it wields enough effectiveness to put a dent in their invasion forces.

So after a day of googling, the closest thing I'm able to find is F.Buski, it's not exactly the same shape, not as elongated as the pics on the internet, it's shorter and stubbier, obviously a trematode fluke and has these scary looking fangs curving forward and downward from the upper front of the "head" part, and more spikes sticking out the left and right sides towards the rear of the almond-oval shaped body, and if it didn't break off, a single greenish yellow fibrous "tail" that extends for a while and disappears into the vine-like tangle of mini-jungle that surrounds these things tending to obscure or shield them.... possibly an elaborate mucus-oid bifilm-like growth created to protect the critter from getting digested or assaulted by immune system killer cells? Most of the other physical characteristics seem to match F.Buski, especially the smooth rounded nose end of them. There is no protrusion or "shoulders" present as in the Fasciolas or Schistosomes. And the size of these things seems to be consistent with that reported for F.Buski.... larger than the others. I learned the lifecycle of these and all that stuff, and breathed a little sigh of relief learning that F.Buski can't reproduce itself entirely inside one human victim (I refuse to call myself a "host", that's a terrible word to use 😤). I also learn about pumpkin seeds and extract of green Black-Walnut husks with Wormwood and cloves, and acquire myself an arsenal of all that plus a few more little bottles of Reese's pyrantel pamoate just in case, Anyway, I use all the natural stuff with 10-16 ounces of fresh pineapple every couple days and start counting dead flukes in my poop until the doctor gets back, and collect a few of the undigested fresher kills in jars with 91% alcohol and seal them up. I give up individual counting at 250 and start estimating. I really dislike digging with a stick into my poop in the toilet to count worms and fish out likely good lab specimens it's disgusting. Anyway to speed things up, I see doc again, tell my saga and studies, he congratulates me on my research and clinical diagnosis, concurs with my findings and prescribes exactly what I was going to ask for, and the official books recommend... six 600mg praziquantel pills, take 3 per day, for two days and let it do it's thing. By the day of the doctor appointment I had crapped out an estimated 700-800 of these bastards. He was a little concerned about such a large number. I was a *LOT* concerned. We hoped I was on the downhill stretch now, and the PZQ would be mopping up the last of the stragglers and I'd be home free. After the round of PZQ was done and a pound of fresh pineapple and a laxative, OMG, I gave birth to a litter of at least 500 more, some quite large, and mostly digested . As if the PZQ didn't make me feel sick enough by itself, the thought that my ravished torn to hell intestines were continuing to digest and absorb god knows what from these things on their way out made me sicker, and the toxic waste actually absorbed was icing on the foul cake..... but NOOOO! These sick bastards had to do one last great act of defiance on their way out. Remember those fangs I mentioned earlier? Well the most robust, undigested larger ones that were still firm and not jelly had to flip me their birds on the way out and carve gashes in the walls of my colon and rectum on their way out. I shat about a half cup of freshly bled blood into my toilet. I'm hurting, I'm tired of this, I don't know how much longer I can fight this. The bastards have almost worn me down. I've continued the pumpkin seeds, green Black-Walnut and clove extract, pineapple, and even threw in another 1,3 grams of pyrantel pamoate last night. I can't afford another $150 prescription for a mere six PZQ pills, so I ordered myself 50 grams of pure PZQ powder and empty capsules to make my own, for $40 total. I don't see any more larger adult flukes coming out anymore but each poop is chock full of what looks like freshly hatched juvenile to adolescent size devils. Total estimated count expelled is about 2000 now, and I'm not exaggerating, if anything that's low. They seem to be stacked up and compacted tightly together now in the stool, tightly woven inside tangled fibrous masses. Is this something other than F.Buski? Something that was able to reproduce itself in a complete cycle inside me without intermediate hosts? Or did I just unknowingly swallow ten thousand plus of the metacercarae at that restaurant and they've been patiently waiting their turns before hatching , lying dormant until intestinal wall space gets vacated by the ones before them that were first in line to eat on my guts? I'm about at my wit's end and ready to turn back into the helpless frightened and sobbing little girl, and admit yeah they did kill me, it just hasn't completed the process yet. Even starting to think dark thoughts that if I'm backed into an inescapable dead end corridor, that suicide would be a better way to go and being an engineer by education, I'd fantasize about make a machine to incinerate my body after detecting cessation of heartbeat and brain activity with shredded magnesium strips to ignite an ample size amount of thermite to turn every last molecule of my lifeless body and all those bastards into plasma. I don't want to die yet, I want to live.

Again, sorry for the long drawn out wall of text, but I hope some of you enjoyed the little bit of humor and storytelling style I tried to embellish my plight with.
Anybody got any advice for me, I'm all ears. My next strategy is to try 75mg/kg of body weight of PZQ per day for 15 days and as much of the natural stuff as I can handle on top of that, and then Colon Cleanse the hell out of my innards and see where that gets me, hopefully I don't fry out my liver and hopefully I don't have F. Hepatica or Schistosomes too mixed in there, or some strange, never before discovered and documented trematode that's incurable.

If I do make it thru this, one thing's for damn sure.... I WILL NEVER EAT AT AN ASIAN FOOD RESTAURANT AGAIN AS LONG AS I LIVE.
Food items are being imported into this country from Asia that are contaminated with parasites and NOT DIDDLY SQUAT is being done to inspect those imports sufficiently. All the websites, textbooks, scientific and medical papers and healthcare professionals who boastfully claim that these parasites don't happen in the USA are full of crap. I'm living proof (for right now anyway) that They are here , more widespread, and more insidious than almost anyone could ever imagine, and the medical establishment really and truly is burying its collective head into the sand and ignoring the problem. Either that or they're fully aware and would rather hide behind their hubris than admit they're caught short and untrained, unequipped, and unprepared to be able to deal with it. Tweet