Warning: How Contact Lenses Can Harm Your Eyes

This is a pretty grisly start to this story, so the weak-of-stomach should be warned now. This is a story about a worm-like creature getting into and living in an 18-year-old student’s eye.

When Jessica Greaney, the student from the University of Nottingham in England, first went to the hospital with a painfully swollen eye the doctors misdiagnosed it. They wanted to believe it was herpes, but when they tested further they found it was much worse.

Worse Than Eye-Herpes?

It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. The doctors clamped Jessica’s eye open and carefully scraped a layer from her eyeball, and found she was suffering from Acanthamoeba keratitis. What is that? I’m glad (not really) you asked.

Acanthamoeba keratitis is the doctory way of saying tiny little worm-like creature. These amoeba typically live in water sources, like fresh water rivers and lakes, or tap water, and what these little suckers do to you is gross, if not devastating.

The Acanthamoeba keratitis had burrowed into Jessica’s eyeball (I know) and started to eat it from the inside out (I’m sorry).

So how did this pervasive little creature find its way into Jessica’s eyeball? She got infected by leaving her contact lenses in a glass of solution in the sink in her dorm room. And it was as simple as a drop of contaminated water splashing onto her contact lens.

The amoeba lived in the area between the contact lens and her eye, eating away at her cornea making its way to her spinal cord. That’s an OMG experience straight out of a horror movie.

So How Did She Treat It?

To treat this life-threatening infection, Greaney had to apply eye drops every 10 minutes. Every. Ten. Minutes. So she couldn’t sleep for several days.

“I wasn’t allowed to sleep properly for nearly a week … Being awake for so many hours led to me watching a [ton] of films with my one good eye,” she wrote in The Nottingham Tab. “After the fourth day, not only was I going insane and crying every five minutes, nothing was changing.”

Thankfully the treatment eventually starting working. As of May 19 she was still administering eye drops, only 22 a day (about one an hour) and it’s expected to continue improving.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Well, if you wear contact lenses, just be sure they’re in a covered case when resting in solution. If you know someone that wear contact lenses, share this article with them. Tell everyone Jessica’s message:

“Even on nights out, I sometimes have to take eye drops with me in a refrigerated bag – still beats nearly being killed by a bug.”

Sources

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a40731/a-parasite-tried-to-eat-this-girls-eyeball-after-she-did-something-contact-wearers-do-every-day/

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