Doctors almost never see the parasite. In paragonimiasis, diagnosis usually comes from finding microscopic eggs in sputum or pleural fluid, and even that fails often enough that patients spend months on the wrong treatment.
So when a thoracoscope went into a 38-year-old woman's chest to work out why fluid kept collecting there, and the camera found something moving on the right posterior pleura near the costal angle, it settled the question immediately. The object was contracting in a peristaltic, wave-like motion. It was a living adult Paragonimus.
