Here’s something horrible to think about while not sleeping tonight: college student Jessica Greaney recently had to stay awake for a week after a parasite got into her eyeball and began munching on her cornea. The horror began when a splash of tap water landed on one of her contact lenses, “and the parasite [Acanthamoeba Keratitis] survived in the area between the lens and my eye,” she wrote for the Tab. A week later, her eye was swollen to the size of a golfball.
If untreated, the parasite can eat its way through the eye and into the spiral cord, causing paralysis or death. Fortunately for Greaney, the doctors treated her, and she had to use eyedrops every 10 minutes to kill the bugger, “leaving her unable to sleep for seven days.”
A nurse would come into her room throughout the day and night to wake her up and hold open her eyes to squirt the droplets in. Even if she nodded off for a few minutes, she would soon be woken up for her next round of medication.
Miss Greaney added: “I wasn’t allowed to sleep properly for nearly a week. It was not dissimilar from Chinese water torture. After the fourth day, not only was I going insane and crying every five minutes, nothing was changing.” (Via)
Eventually, her eye began to heal, but still: can’t sleep, Acanthamoeba Keratitis will eat me. Can’t sleep, Acanthamoeba Keratitis will eat me…
(Via The Daily Mail)