An ultra competitive 'beauty pageant mom' in Florida fed her daughter tapeworm eggs in a bid to make her lose weight before a competition.
When the teenage girl was admitted to hospital after suffering agonising stomach pains, nurses thought she could be pregnant.
But after taking a trip to the toilet, they were horrified to discover the real - and extremely gross - source of her pain.
“It was a toilet bowl full of tapeworms,” Maricar Cabral-Osorio, a nurse who had attended the girl, told the TV programme Untold Stories of the ER.
“It was so gross, she had pooped all these tapeworms. There were a couple that were very long and wiggling around trying to get out of the toilet bowl,” she said.
It emerged on the show that the mother had bought tapeworm eggs in Mexico.
“The mom was apologising to the girl. It’s like, ‘I’m so sorry. You know, I did it just to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on the pageant’,” she added.
It is not known whether the mother faced criminal charges as a result of her actions or not.
If you want to see what was wiggling around in the toilet, here is a close-up of a tapeworm:
