A routine laparoscopic hernia repair proved anything but when surgeons discovered a decades-old tapeworm, measuring 26cm, lodged in their patient’s peritoneal cavity.

The 71-year-old South Korean patient had no symptoms before his elective right inguinal hernia repair other than a painless bulge and no evidence of eosinophilia, his doctors reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The tapeworm was found in the space between the anterior surface of the bladder and the pubic bone.

 “The tapeworm measured 26cm in length and continued to move after it had been extracted,” wrote the authors, from the Jeonbuk National University Medical School in Jeonju.