Title:

The Woman With a Worm in her Head

Author:

Pamela Nagami M.D.

Category:

Non-fiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

August 9, 2025

he Woman With a Worm in Her Head & Other True Stories of Infectious Diseases should not be read by anyone who is a hypochondriac - if you are already worried about falling sick from deadly germs, this book will scare the daylights out of you. Even if not a hypochondriac, reading this book will give you an uneasy feeling as you realize how fragile we all are. Every one of us is vulnerable to the vagaries fate; we could fall victim to a host of debilitating diseases based upon the random hand of fate. The Woman With A Worm in Her Head was published in 2001, which means all the descriptions of the medical procedures used to combat infections are twentieth century techniques. I wonder now, 25 years later, how much better any of our modern medical skills actually are.

There are some harrowing descriptions in here about what happens when a deadly diseases erupts in a person. Not all of these stories have happy outcomes, despite heroic efforts by the doctors and nurses; some of the patients described herein die horrible deaths (including one man from chicken pox). Nagami does not shy away from gruesome details, such as the havoc wrought by a parasitic worm has it burrows through your body (if it gets into your brain, you are REALLY in trouble). Your lungs might fill with blood, your skin could peel off, lack of circulation could result in gangrene that results in amputation of a limb - the awful symptoms are described without restraint. There is a virulent strain of malaria that required them to drain all the infected blood from a patient and replace it with entirely new, uncontaminated transfusions.

The chapter on AIDS was particularly poignant. Back when this was written, there was little anyone could do to stop the horrible demise of so many AIDS patients. Now there is a wonderous cocktail of drugs that seemingly suppresses the AIDS virus and allows victims to lead normal, fulfilling lives. The PEPFAR plan from the George W Bush administration contributed billions to halting the AID/HIV global pandemic - it was probably the best achievement of his administration; it saved millions of lives.

Nagami writes about her personal life too; she grows attached to some patients who require weeks or months of care as they attempt to recover. She also describes the dangers of the job, when one of her children gets sick, she fears that she may have carried a lethal germ home with her. Once Nagami accidentally sticks herself with a syringe that she had just stuck into an AIDS patient, and she is terrified that now she may contract it herself (she did not).

It is clear that Nagami's experience is crucial to successful health outcomes - she can guess from symptoms what patients are suffering from (even before analysis can be done to confirm the exact cause of infection) - this allows her to prescribe antibiotics quicker, or blood transfusions sooner, and to know what to monitor and what else to look for. Clearly, Nagami worked as an infectious disease expert for years and years.

I am certainly glad that there are doctors as dedicated to their profession as Dr. Nagami. She does a job that I could never do. Facing suffering patients stricken with deadly infectious diseases takes a lot of courage. It is disturbing that there are so many lethal diseases just waiting to kill us.