This is the story of a dog-ophobe, a dog-ophile and the parasite that brought them together. The dog-ophobe (for want of a better word) is a patient. The dog-ophile is her doctor -- me.
My story is simple. At the end of the day, I look forward to two spaniels at home more than I do comfort food. Their wags are my Prozac, their snores my lullaby. So now you know where they sleep. Not under the bedcovers, but close.
By coincidence, my work also involves animals, but with a twist. I'm an expert in the parasites they occasionally transmit to humans.
Which leads me to my patient, a charming person who exudes kindness toward all creatures great and small. Here in dog-struck Los Angeles, I could easily picture her with an equally charming pooch. There's just one catch. For as long as she can remember, she has deeply distrusted dogs.
To explain why is to tell a tale both earthy and sad: of her lifelong battle with a tapeworm that once lived in a dog's intestine. That dog excreted a microscopic egg that my patient, as a child, unknowingly swallowed. That egg released a larva that entered her liver and slowly grew -- and grew -- and grew.
Several decades later, my patient underwent a liver transplant, her ultimate standoff against a canine parasite that spawns generation upon generation of bubble-like cysts in human organs -- livers in particular.
My patient is far from alone in suffering this blight, of course. More than 1 million people worldwide -- most of whom can barely imagine the high-tech medical care she has received -- harbor the same invader. The majority live in remote places where dogs and sheep (the animals from which dogs acquire the tapeworms) are in close contact.
During my career in Los Angeles, I've seen roughly two dozen people with Echinococcus granulosus, all of whom contracted their infection years to decades before immigrating to the United States. Some I've treated with pills, some I've referred for surgical procedures. But none of these sufferers required a liver transplant.
A huge, Y-shaped abdominal scar and a medicine cabinet lined with anti-rejection drugs are daily reminders of my patient's long-ago "gift" from man's best friend. As for the creature that launched her fate, she never knew its face or eyes or bark. But she does know when they met.
The year was 1942, the place Palestine. Conditions in the then-British protectorate were harsh save one virtue: It was far from the Holocaust. But along with my patient's security came her medical fate: a mote of Middle East dust ferrying a tiny egg.
