Secretly feeding worm eggs to a child sounds like a scene out of a horror movie, but it was a reality for one teenage beauty queen, whose story was recounted on a recent episode of Discovery Health’s Untold Stories of the ER.

In an effort to make her daughter lose weight for a beauty competition, a Florida mother bought and fed tapeworm eggs to her teenage pageant star without her knowledge. Soon after, the girl was admitted to the hospital with painful stomach cramps.

The pain passed after the girl used the bathroom, and Maricar Cabral-Osori, the girl’s ER nurse, reported seeing a toilet bowl full of long tapeworms struggling to escape.

She said, “It was so gross and 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.”

Cabral-Osori said the woman turned white when she saw what her daughter had passed. The guilty mother told her daughter that she had just wanted her to “lose a little weight” before the pageant.

Dr. Patricia Quinlisk of the Iowa Department of Public Health, says the use of tapeworms for weight loss is extremely dangerous.