There’s a Worm in Your Eye, Brah
By Cleet
How’s your day going? I know it’s early and your day may end up sucking, but at least you didn’t have a worm in you eye that was eating your retina. A man from Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which is also the home of my friend Walter Peck, EPA 3rd District) recently encountered a startling reality; a worm was swimming around in his eyeball and feeding on it. John Matthews went to the doctor with blurry vision in his left eye. Then Dr. James Folk discovered Mr. Squiggly (as I’ve named him) in a picture of the retina.
“It actually lives underneath the retina of the eye and crawls around and eats the retina,” Folk said. “The worm goes into the gut, digests in the gut, and actually doesn’t crawl through the blood vessels, but crawls through the tissue all the way to the eyes and the brain.”
Dr. Folk then handled the problem the only way a rational man of science can: a laser. John had some kind words for the Doctor pointing a laser into his eye socket:
“Hurry up and kill the thing. Good luck shootin’, doc
There are only 15 known cases like this in the world so it appears Mr. Matthews hit the lottery, only the bad kind. Yet much like Elvis Costello, Dr. Folk’s aim was true and he killed the eye muncher. Mr. Squiggly did not go quietly though,
Dr. Folk said, “When you hit it with the laser, it got very upset. As upset as a worm can get, I suppose…The thing was just thrashing around violently. It would be like one of those titan movies or something.”
They got Mr. S and left his lifeless corpse in John’s eye to decompose over time but Matthew’s vision may never return to its original state. It’s a bummer for Matthews as he was an avid hunter. Just in case you were not completely freaked out, the story parts with this food for thought:
Although this condition is rare, Dr. Folk says, in one day, an adult raccoon can shed 60 million eggs that contain these kinds of worms. Folk says Matthews could have somehow ingested raccoon dander. However, John will probably never know exactly how or when the worm got inside him.
So as you step outside to take a deep breath of autumn air, be careful not to ingest eye-eating worms. I’ll have to consult Adam, but this might qualify as third worst story ever.
