Doctors were shocked after performing an endoscopy and finding a giant WORM in the patient’s stomach.

Medics thought they were carrying out a routine procedure to remove gallstones from the woman in Buriram, northeastern Thailand, on April 19.

However, they were shocked when the cameras showed the parasite wiggling around inside her stomach.

Calm-headed doctors plucked out the pesky critter – identified as a large roundworm or Ascaris lumbricoides – before continuing to extract the stones in her bile duct.

Dr Thirayut Veerasatien, MD, Fellowship in General Surgery at Buri Ram Hospital, said the patient had no symptoms related to the roundworm

He said: ‘The patient received albendazole together with other anti-parasitic drugs and needed at least a week to recover.

‘She was very lucky that the worm didn’t cause an infection and she didn’t have any of the common symptoms such as stomach pain.’

Medics later sent footage from the Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) to Assistant Professor Dr Nathkapach Rattanapitoon at the Suranaree University of Technology in Nakhon Ratchasima for further studying.

Dr Rattanapitoon said: ‘These roundworms are normally 20 – 35 centimetres long. They have been found in an estimated 807 million – 1.2 billion people around the world.’

Around 0.22 per cent of the population in Thailand have been reported to be infected with the giant roundworms in 2020.

The parasite can be transmitted by unclean food, vegetables, drinking water and being directly exposed to the soil. Children are risky for this kind of worm since they love playing with dirt.